To Each His Own (1946)

Toronto Film Society presented To Each His Own (1946) on Monday, July 7, 1986 in a double bill with The Eagle and the Hawk as part of the Season 39 Summer Series, Programme 1.

Production Company: Paramount.  Director: Mitchell Leisen.  Producer: Charles Brackett.  Screenplay: Jacques Thiery and Charles Brackett, from a story by Charles Brackett.  Cinematography: Daniel L. Papp.  Special Photographic Effects: Gordon Jennings.  Process Photography: Farciot Edouart.  Music: Victor Young.  Editing: Alma Macrorie.

Cast:  Olivia de Havilland (Josephine Norris), John Lund (Captain Bart Cosgrove/Gregory Pearson), Mary Anderson (Corinne Pearson), Roland Culver (Lord Desham), Phillip Terry (Alex Pearson), Bill Goodwin (Mac Tilton), Virginia Welles (Liz Lorimer), Victoria Horne (Daisy Gingras), Griff Barnett (Mr. Norris), Alma Macrorie (Belle Ingham), Bill Ward (Gregory as a child), Frank Faylen (Babe), Willard Robertson (Dr. Hunt), Arthur Loft (Mr. Clinton), Virginia Farmer (Mrs. Clinton), Doris Lloyd (Mrs. Pringle), Clyde Cooke (Mr. Hackett), Ida Moore (Miss Claflin), Mary Young (Mrs. Rix), Harlan Briggs.

Paramount’s publicity releases for To Each His Own promised the audience something special, proclaiming the film as “one of the three great love stories of all time” and insisting that “As long as there are lovers–this picture will live!”  As usual, the hyperbole served to cover up the studio’s own reservations, for To Each His Own was the last of a long cycle of melodramas dealing with unrequited mother love, which had included Madame X, Stella Dallas, and The Old Maid, and which the studio feared might have gone out of style by the mid-40’s.  To Each His Own, however, proved to be the best as well as the last of its genre.  Based on an excellent script by Charles Brackett, directed with sensitivity, restraint and a careful eye for detail by Leisen, and crowned with a tour-de-force performance by Olivia de Havilland, the film successfully surmounted the limited credibility of its plot and the memories of earlier, similar productions to become a huge hit.  Leslie Halliwell describes it as “the woman’s picture par excellence, put together with tremendous Hollywood flair and extremely enjoyable to watch.”  The New York Times reviewer was more explicit:  “To Each His Own spins dangerously on the brink of bathos but seldom spills over into that treacherous chasm for more than a fleeting scene or two, thanks to a screen play which artfully dodges complete morbidity.”  The comment is a reminder of the high degree of emotional manipulation and sentimentality films such as To Each His Own generally contained–a combination which has not proven to be to everyone’s taste.  Pauline Kael is one critic who is quite scathing about the film, dismissing it as an “illegitimacy tearjerker”:

This time it’s Ollivia de Havilland who gives up her bouncing baby so he’ll have a name.  John Lund bats his eyelashes as her dashing aviator lover, and also as the sone when, in the inevitable progression of events, she becomes a successful business woman (she operates a cosmetics outfit, like Elizabeth Arden’s) and meets up with him (wearing wings like his father before him).  As an example of the “woman’s picture” this doesn’t have any of the grubbiness or conviction of the Barbara Stanwyck Stella Dallas, but de Havilland works hard confecting cold cream, and her exertions won her the Academy Award.  The atmosphere of lugubrious sensitivity is probably just what the director, Mitchell Leisen, wanted.  He had a better side that came out in comedy.

All of this, however, overlooks the demands of the genre, which insisted on just sentimentality.

Leisen’s meticulous recreation of the past for the film’s World War I sequences is worth noting.  His care with sets, hairstyles, and costumes reveals his pasts career as a set designer for C.B. DeMille and makes a welcome exception to Hollywood’s usual sloppiness in recreating the recent past.

Notes by Laurie McNeice