Our Very Own

Our Very Own starts out presenting the average American family picture that folks would later come to expect on such shows as Leave It To Beaver and The Donna Reed Show. Parents Jane Wyatt and Donald Cook have three beautiful daughters, Ann Blyth, Joan Evans, and Natalie Wood in descending order. It's a red letter day in the family with Ann's impending graduation from high school.

The girls have their usual teen problems including a nice little rivalry between Blyth and Evans for Farley Granger. But when Evans while looking for her own birth certificate finds Blyth's adoption papers, she uses them without measuring the consequences.

The film is nice family entertainment for the time and I have to say the sentiment is kept in check for this type of film. Our Very Own got an Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Recording.

But the young leads Granger and Blyth are too old and look it to be playing teens. Granger was 25 and Blyth 22. On the other hand Joan Evans was 16 and Martin Milner 19 and the script has them a year younger than Granger and Blyth. There's also a great performance by Ann Dvorak as Blyth's birth mother.

Still Ann delivers a nice performance and it really would have been nice had they given her a song to sing, maybe at the climax which is the graduation.

A suburban Los Angeles family is rocked by the revelation one of three daughters is adopted. The label is placed upon eldest Ann Blyth (as Gail Macaulay), a high school teenager about to graduate. She dates handsome TV installation man Farley Granger (as Chuck), who says "mother knows best." As it often happens, middle daughter Joan Evans (as Joan) arrived right after the adoption. Jealous of older sis, Ms. Evans would like some kissing time with Mr. Granger. Otherwise perfect mother Jane Wyatt (as Lois) could never find the right moment to tell Ms. Blyth she was adopted...

Real mother Ann Dvorak (as Gert) has a hard life. Father Donald Cook (as Fred) smacks his girls with an open palm. Mouthy littlest daughter Natalie Wood (as Penny) annoys the heck out of genuinely funny Gus Schilling (as Frank) when he installs the family's new TV set. Fresh-faced teenager Martin Milner has the best up-and-coming role and adoring family servant Jesse Grayson dons her maid uniform for the last time. "Our Very Own" is a slickly produced melodrama which suggests that Samuel Goldwyn, if he were born 50 years later, would have been very successful in 1950s television.

****** Our Very Own (7/27/50) David Miller ~ Ann Blyth, Farley Granger, Joan Evans, Jane Wyatt

This movie was made in 1949, just 4 years after the end of World War 2. It was a time when the average American family got to enjoy the post-war USA: Having Dad at home and not fighting a war , Mom at home instead of working in a factory making bombs , being able to buy gas anytime you wanted and having the thrill of seeing the what everyone wanted: a TV set in their home. It is with this backdrop, that one of the smaller studios, RKO, produced this wonderful and warm-hearted story of a young woman who discovers a secret kept from her since birth. It is not a typical story for it's time and that what makes it so different. It was written and directed with much care while dealing with a very sensitive subject. The major Hollywood Studios like MGM, Paramount, Warners, etc, still made all of the big-budget films, but RKO turned out some real good ones and Our Very Own is at the top of the list.

The film starts out feeling sickeningly saccharine. Natalie Wood's character is extremely annoying. I guess they did this to establish what a happy family they are. It is overdone. The film gets serious and very good - especially for its time. Ann Dvorak is outstanding as usual.

I watched this movie on the strength of comments on this site. I was not a great fan of any of the actors save for Natalie Wood and Ann Dvorak and neither was the headliner. But I stand corrected. Notwithstanding the negative comments posted by adopted IMDb members I found the film compelling on several levels. It touched me deeply. Several scenes brought tears to my eyes with the same effect on my wife who is the tough one in the family. They weren't melodramatic, just done with the right dose of pathos to convey feelings and put the viewer in the characters' places. Each member of the family was successively portrayed and then relegated to the background to focus on Ann Blyth's character, her adoptive parents and her birth mother. All these actors' performances were just right, Dvorak's in particular.

One scene stands out in my mind and I don't think I'm giving much away in retelling it: after Blyth discovers she was adopted she asks the family maid Violet - played by Jessica Grayson in another memorable performance - if she knew. Violet answers "Honey I was here when they brought you 18 years ago". Grayson delivered it with just the right amount of sensitivity to underscore to us and the deeply wounded Blyth that the circumstances of her birth had no effect on her status within the family. There were many more such vignettes, when Blyth returns at 3am and gets yelled at by her father, when Blyth and Wyatt get tangled up in the meaning of the word "mother" the morning after the revelation, the look of fear on Wyatt's face when she allows her second daughter to look for her birth certificate. They showed us a strong, caring family, with patient, intelligent and understanding parents capable of mistakes they were not afraid to admit and tackle. Nobody was all good or all bad, just people with a full range of human strengths and frailties, people like you and me.

I could go on like this forever and give away the whole plot but I'll stop here and close with another memorable scene I feel rounds out this movie. It takes place before Blyth discovers she's adopted, on the beach with Farley Granger. They come out of the surf, draw close and Blyth reaches up on her tiptoes to kiss Granger. The camera draws away and looks down on them from high up as the waves approach them from both sides to merge where they stand. There was a raw sensuality to this scene. It was full of the passion that complements altruistic love.