Maybe Not Fit For The Primetime Hallmark Channel- Gary Cooper’s “Peter Ibbetson” (1935)-A Short Film Review    

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Peter Ibbetson, starring Ann Harding, Gary Cooper, 1935

Hasn’t the Hallmark Channel except this time of year add in some Christmas carols and a few decorated trees, etc. already done the plotline to this film, this 1935 film Peter Ibbetson, starring a mustachioed Gary Cooper in the title role and Ann Harding as his flame Mary. (He last seen in this publication in a review, a debunking expose of the legendary American Old West outlaw Link Jones who must have had a pretty press agent to beat the rap as a bad guy by self-proclaimed legend-slayer young Will Bradley). I know of whence I speak since Laura Perkins, yes, the Laura Perkins who writes here and my long-time companion is “addicted” to this channel’s television products this holiday time of year and some days I heard the plot-line as background when I am working or reading.

Let me outline, with Laura’s key input and approval, the plot and see if except the last almost surreal end minutes this couldn’t have been one of the long line of similar Hallmark presentations and saved the channel some money for screenwriters (although they probably only spent about six dollars on that expense from the dialogue and stories that I have overheard but please don’t tell Laura that). Some young professional woman returns home (for Christmas but any holiday would do) having either dumped or been dumped by some unworthy guy who didn’t see her positive qualities, or he didn’t have any as the case may be. During that home stay, and this is the important connector to the film under review, she runs into, one way or another “the boy next door,” some guy from her youth growing up in splendid small-town America. Either she had a crush on him or him her when they were young and that sets the “drama” for the rest of the production. Until that last clinching kiss after one or the other, or both have tried to avoid destiny call.            

Fast forward, no, fast backward. Peter and Mary are the children of English ex-pats in the 19^th century who live in some splendor in Paris-and are next door neighbors. And are fast friends despite their childhood predilections. Young Peter’s mother though dies of what probably was consumption then, tuberculous now and he is shipped back to England with some ne’er-do-well uncle. Before parting they swear undying devotion to each other. (Interestingly we see neither Peter or Mary’s father so maybe that ex-pat business had to do with their mothers as we called it in the old Acre working class section of North Adamsville where I grew up “going to see Aunt Emma,” leaving town or in this case country to have a child out of wedlock, to be pregnant, to bear illegitimate children no big deal now but very big then.)      

That promise to reunite is what drives the second part of the film when Peter as an adult has taken up the profession of architect and Mary has landed on her feet very nicely by marrying an older man, an English Duke of the realm and loaded with dough and love of horses if not of Mary. And she him, the not in love part. The reunion, the dragged out reunion, between the pair gets resolved when up and coming architect Peter is commissioned by the Duke and Duchess to build a new stable for the horses, a job he will supervise for a couple of months without either him or Mary figuring out the basis of the growing attraction between them. Naturally the relationship between the two former neighbors grows putting everything in doubt once the Duke, who may have loved horses and not loved Mary, still was no fool and saw what was going on between them. Saw and had enough jealous rage to plot their murders. Except in the melee the Duke was killed by Peter. No good could come of that.

Frankly, Peter should have gotten himself a better lawyer because what was clearly a case of self-defense got him convicted of a murder rap in very protective of nobility England. Here is where things veer off from a Hallmark script. Essentially Peter and Mary are so much in love that they have a mystical bond between them which lasts for the rest of their lives despite being apart. Peter in some hell-hole Dickens Dartmoor dungeon and her in tortured splendor at her estate (she always seems to land on her feet unlike Peter who takes it on the chin always). I suspected they like Thomas de Quincy and Sam Coleridge were doing some very strong drugs but that is mere speculation. In any case when Mary dies Peter passes away as well although they will be united for eternity wherever they wind up. You know maybe I am wrong, maybe this one has too much drama, too much melodrama to pass muster on the Hallmark Channel. Laura agrees.