Coeur secret

This was obviously a Claudette Colbert vehicle. "The Secret Heart" is not shown often these days, and it's a good melodrama, typical of the era. Robert Z. Leonard directs with panache this story about a woman's sacrifice and decency.

If you haven't seen the film, perhaps you should not read further.

We first meet Leola (Lee) aboard a luxury liner with Chris Matthews, who is obviously in love with her. Lee has been asked to marry Chris' best friend Larry, and Lee feels her duty to go ahead with her plans to marry this troubled man, a widower with two small children. What Lee gets from that union is much more than what she bargained for. Larry turns out to be an embezzler at the bank he works for. His guilt will make him commit suicide.

Lee decides the right thing to do is to repay Larry's debts and hide from the young children the fact about their father's suicide. Chase, the boy, is a grounded person and he goes on with his life. Young and fragile Penny, who adored her father and the music he played, never recovers and retreats into a cocoon; she becomes a troubled girl that only finds comfort in playing the piano just to imitate her father.

Claudette Colbert does wonders playing the courageous Lee. She caters to the children and becomes a successful real estate agent. Of course, as the stereotypical step-mother of all dramas, she is not appreciated by Penny, the girl that carries a grudge toward Lee. Walter Pigeon is the man who has loved Lee forever, but he is too decent to even come close to her. June Allyson is perfect as Penny, the neurotic girl who will find the truth about her father's fate at the end. In minor roles we see Robert Sterling, Patricia Medina, Richard Derr and Lionel Barrymore.

This film is well crafted and acted under Mr. Leonard's ti

June Allyson can't accept stepmom Cluadette Colbert and (after her father dies), begins to lose touch with reality. A very eerie film...sometimes seems more like a horror film. The performances are excellent (especially Allyson and Colbert) and it looks fantastic. The psychology is a bit dated, but the film still works. Not for everybody, but worth seeing.

Greer Garson must have been on holiday or working on another film at MGM when The Secret Heart was being cast. Claudette Colbert stepped into her shoes to play the female lead in another film that by all rights should be on the list of Walter Pidgeon/Greer Garson films.

The Secret Heart concerns stepmother Claudette Colbert concerned for the welfare of her two stepchildren, Robert Sterling and June Allyson, particularly Allyson. June is a talented pianist but she's increasingly withdrawing from the world citing a heart condition that cardiologists can't find a reason for. When Claudette sees psychologist Lionel Barrymore, she tells Barrymore about her marriage with their late father, Richard Derr and the tragic circumstances and gossip that surrounded his death.

The cure prescribes Dr. Barrymore is to be found at their New England coastal farm where Derr died and this might unlock Allyson's psychosis. Of course a whole lot of the family's dirty linen gets an airing before the film concludes.

Walter Pidgeon has not all that much to do, but be the tower of strength as the best friend of Derr and the man Colbert was really secretly in love with. The film is carried by the leading women of the cast, Colbert and Allyson. The two play well off each other, especially Allyson. This was quite a change from the usual goody-goody girl next door types she was always cast.

I should also single out Richard Derr who in the few scenes he has suggested a brooding melancholy that you will remember throughout the film. His performance has to be good in order to understand why Allyson is the way she is.

The Secret Heart is a nice psychological soap opera with Claudette Colbert standing in nicely for Greer Garson.

This is the kind of WASP angst movie that in the skilled directorial hands of a Sirk, Stevens or Stahl would have been visually striking and dramatically compelling but in the very average mitts of Robert Z. Leonard is mostly tepid schlock with admittedly decent performances from the three leads. The biggest problem I had with it was the general blandness of the proceedings. I realize WASPS are on the repressed, undemonstrative side (I know this because I was married to one) but it's almost as if Leonard and his scenarists went out of their way to find the most bottled up and fizzled out members of this buttoned down sect in all of Rhode Island and large swaths of eastern Connecticut. Little of the dialogue in the screenplay by Whitfield Cook and Ann Morrison Chapin, whose names sound like headmasters of a dull prep school, is of much interest. When it isn't being mushy, as in the love scenes between Pidgeon and Colbert, it's annoyingly melodramatic, as in Colbert's final pep talk to Allyson that too easily "cures" her of her daddy fixation. Also in the spirit of WASP repression the screenplay leaves out essential stuff, like how Larry's first wife died, and informing Allyson's shrink (a refreshingly restrained Lionel Barrymore) that his patient has, you know, just tried to off herself. And Leonard's typically somnolent direction assures that any potential excitement, be it from Colbert's boogie woogie dance to Allyson's suicide attempt, will remain firmly latent. C plus.

PS...I counted five times Colbert was shot from her right profile. That's the kind of stuff you do when you're watching a boring movie.

An oddity that comes closest, I think, to a noirish family drama. Troubled Penny (Allyson) is obsessed with her dead father, causing problems with her stepmom (Colbert) especially when they become rivals over affections of family friend Chris (Pidgeon). It's a June Allyson seldom seen and a long way from her usual bubbly roles. Still, she handles the disturbed daughter's antics in effective fashion. Those scenes at cliff's edge bordering an eternal sea are eerily enchanting and a tribute to the production crew. This was a period following the war when movies with strong Freudian themes were popular, including Bewitched (1945) and The Snake Pit (1948). .

The acting is first-rate, and I especially like Sterling as the upbeat Chase who furnishes a counterpoint of normality to the moody family atmosphere. Pidgeon too is suavely effective, though his Chris seems a little dense about Penny's obvious designs on him. The version I saw (TMC) didn't include the narration by Hume Cronyn listed in the credits. Perhaps it's just as well since the movie works well enough without a voice-over. The ending is about what you'd expect from this Code enforced period and is way too pat for what's gone before. Nonetheless, it's an effective little exercise that manages a shade of difference from other programmers of the period.