This pick for the Marriage in the Movies course is the longest one to date. At a full three hours long, it apparently qualifies as an epic and indeed includes both an overture and an intermission with orchestral scores! It’s also clearly an American propaganda film, made to bolster morale on the homefront while the Second World War was still raging. In most cases, that’s a recipe for a bad film yet Since You Went Away manages to be surprisingly effective and affecting.

Set in an unnamed American town, it tells the tale of the Hilton family immediately after the father leaves for war. Claudette Colbert plays Anne who has to take care of her two daughters Jane and Brig. Family friend Tony Willett frequently drops by and flirts with Anne. When times become harder, they take in a boarder, the elderly William Smollet, and eventually befriend the cantankerous old man. Jane eventually falls in love with his estranged grandson, Bill Smollet. In the meantime, the men are shipped off one by one while the women anxiously wait at home for news.

One reason why this film is so effective is that it starts on a deceptively cheery note. Sure, Anne already misses her husband and we see them girding themselves for hardship, but the Hiltons are such a postcard-perfect, wholesome, all-American family that it is impossible to believe that anything bad could happen to them while the war feels so very far away. But signs that there is indeed a war going on ramp up gradually and it intrudes ever more brusquely into their everyday routine until it dominates their lives. At first there is the incidental talk about ration cards and war bonds, then come the reports of the dead and the missing that arrive one by one and finally the hospital wards full of wounded and broken soldiers. By the end, every telephone call is a source of dread.

Yet this is a propaganda film so it must show the Americans facing these trials with courage and perfect conviction. The women may weep piteously for their men who are about to leave but they never break down and tell them not to go forth and do their duty. Anne never falters in her devotion to her absent husband and eventually an impassioned speech by her daughter even convinces her to contribute to the war effort in a more personal manner. I note however that even the director must have found it difficult to picture Colbert as a welder so we never see her face under the welding helmet. If that’s not enough flag-waving for you, there’s even a bit about a refugee expressing how grateful she is to be in the US by citing the plaque on the Statue of Liberty.

Still, while all this boosterism makes the film distinctly implausible, it doesn’t quite cross over to become annoying. Director John Cromwell, who also helmed Made For Each Other, keeps things interesting and delivers some decent emotional high points. The cinematography is better and even darker than you might expect. The performers are all excellent. This is the first time we’ve seen a performance by Colbert, who has been a huge Hollywood star since the silent era, and by Shirley Temple in what is effectively one of her final screen appearances.

I do quite like the idea of a film capturing what life in the homefront was like during the war but unfortunately Since You Went Away is far from an honest portrayal. Patriotic or nostalgic Americans may well find reasons to like it and I understand that it’s a special favorite for watching during the Christmas holidays. For most other cinema-goers however, this is an entertaining movie but not an especially remarkable one.