Waterloo Bridge

Year:  1940

Filming:  Black & White

Length:  108 minutes

Genre:  Drama/Romance/Tragedy/War

Maturity:  PG (for intense thematic elements)

Cast:  Vivien Leigh (Myra), Robert Taylor (Roy Cronin),

Lucille Watson (Lady Margaret Cronin), Virginia Field (Kitty),

Maria Ouspenskaya (Madame Olga Kirowa), C. Aubrey Smith (The Duke), Halliwell Hobbes (Vicar at St. Matthew’s), Rita Carlyle (Flower Woman)

  

Director:  Mervyn LeRoy

Personal Rating:  3 Stars

***

    I’m generally none-too-keen on tragedies. When I sit down to watch TV, I usually want to see pictures with either a happy or at least a hopeful conclusion, for at least some of the characters. But Waterloo Bridge, tragedy though it may be, has a certain timeless quality and serves as cautionary tale for those teeter on the brink of despair and a tender story about the enduring quality of true love.

    The story opens in London during the First World War. Robert Taylor stars as Roy Cronin, a young officer in the British Army who is preparing to be deployed overseas in a matter of days. In the midst of an air raid over Waterloo Bridge, he meets a beautiful ballerina named Myra, played by Vivien Leigh. She gives him her lucky ladybug charm and says she hopes it will keep him safe in the trenches. Later that evening, he attends her ballet performance and takes her on a date at a romantic candlelight club.

    The ballet school instructor, Madame Olga Kirowa, is fiercely against any of her students becoming romantically involved, and tries to come between Myra and Roy. But with the help of her best friend, Kitty, Myra manages to slip out for another excursion with her soldier who plans on marrying her that very day. Unfortunately, their plans have to be postponed until the following morning, and Roy is suddenly ordered overseas that very night.

    To make matters worse, Madame Kirowa fires Myra and Kitty from the ballet troupe and they are forced to live in miserable conditions in the city. Practically starving, Myra hopes to obtain help from Roy’s mother, Lady Margaret, who has traveled down from Scotland to meet with her. But when Myra spies an article in the newspaper listing Roy among the battle casualties, she acts erratic and unstable in front of his mother, refusing to tell her the reason for her consternation. Lady Margaret leaves bewildered.

    Believing that the love of her life is dead, and still unable to get a job, Myra follows Kitty’s example and becomes a prostitute. Then to her shock, while searching for “customers” at a train station, she discovers that Roy is alive and still very intent on marrying her. Shocked and ashamed, she tries to bury her past and travels to with Roy to his family’s country estate in Scotland. There, everything is too good to be true as Roy’s mother, uncle, and other family members welcome her with open arms.

    Myra soon finds herself unable to keep up the charade, especially after his military uncle gives her a monologue about the honor that must be upheld for Roy’s family and regiment, and how he is sure she would never fail them. She finally divulges her sordid past to Lady Margaret, who is shocked yet sympathetic. But when she insists Myra tells her son everything, the former ballerina swears his mother to silence and runs away.

    When Roy finds out she has left, he follows her back to London where he and Kitty desperately search for her. In the process, he discovers the whole truth about Myrna’s time as a prostitute. Even as events take an ironically tragic twist on Waterloo Bridge where they first met, Roy finds a deeper source of love within himself than he had ever known existed.

    As mentioned above, I am not keen on tragedies in film because they often follow a seemingly preordained series of unfortunate events concocted by fatalists determined to sell more Kleenex in movie theatres. Conversely, I enjoy tragic poetry because the medium seems to lend itself more to the ominous. Plus, it takes a shorter time to get through. When sitting down to watch TV, however, I usually gravitate towards more inspirational fare. For example, while A Man for All Seasons, Braveheart, and For Greater Glory end with the main characters biting the dust, we still feel enthused to charge the heights in their memory. The title of tragedy is veritably snatched away altogether.

    But Waterloo Bridge is not your average soap-opera-style doom-and-gloom flick. It also has a depth of feeling and artfulness in production that could only comes out of war-time Hollywood. This is another film where the black-and-white shooting that fits the mood to a tee. The foggy London streets and Waterloo Bridge are expertly captured in foreboding atmospheric shots. The music is also expertly chosen. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is used as the background for much of the movie, which I thought was very haunting, reminding the viewer both of Myra’s life as a ballerina and foreseeable death by her own hand.

  

    The acting overall was quite good, and I especially liked Vivien Leigh in this role. She has such a wonderful “far off” look, with eyebrow raised mysteriously. I was pleasantly surprised to see her playing a sympathetic character once, since her roles as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and Lady Hamilton in That Hamilton Women did little to endear her to me. She successfully made Myra a relatable character we really can sob over as fate conspires against her.

    I think Robert Taylor may have been a bit miscast considering that he’s supposed to be playing an officer from Scotland and doesn’t have the least hint of an accent beyond Midwestern America. But even so, I thought he did a pretty good job as a lovable yet impetuous young soldier. Interestingly, Leigh herself had been opposed to Taylor being cast in the part, insisting that Laurence Olivier be cast instead. But in the end, both of them worked out well together and considered this film to be one of their personal favorites. Taylor was especially appreciative that Leigh resigned her reservations about him and showed him the ropes.

    One thing that irked me a bit was the beginning of the film in which Taylor is supposed to be an old man reminiscing on his stormy romantic past, looking mistily over Waterloo Bridge. My first reaction was to laugh because he simply didn’t look like an old man. It was obvious someone had dumped flour in his hair, pasted a fake white mustache on his upper lip, and told him to try on hobble on a cane.

    The other thing that seemed to leave a gap was the manner of Myra’s suicide. Considering that the main motif of this production is Waterloo Bridge, and Taylor is shown at the beginning staring wistfully into the water, it seemed almost a given that she was going to throw herself off the bridge. This would have been one more correlation linking her to Swan Lake and would have fit the irony perfectly. But instead, Myra walks in front of a truck. It just didn’t seem congruent with the way the plot was leading. Perhaps this was intended as a twist, but it still left me feeling like the final element of the tragedy was given short-shrift.

    But nevertheless, this film is generally a piece of good cinema, even if it is meant to make people in a good mood feel bad and people in a bad mood feel worse. This is realism at its best, recognizing that such is the state of life for many and hopefully helping us to enhance our sense of compassion and understanding for those around us with troubled pasts. Waterloo Bridge may not be my favorite flick, and I won’t be rushing out to watch it again, but it is definitely worth a watch for its complex characters, plausible circumstances, an appealing romance, terrific setting, and powerful lesson to be learned.

   

Myra (Vivien Leigh) dances with Roy (Robert Taylor) at his Scottish Estate