I'll Turn to You

I love watching films from this era... enjoyed this one too, but... it was awful... I mean quite ridiculous.... A very silly directionless film packed with cringeworthy script. Sadly the lead male actor who played Roger the returning soldier from Burma, lost his life in a car crash a year after this film was made... the actress who played his wife I believe is still alive at 106. Lots of strange musical interludes but it's not a musical. Worth a watch though to see what post war Britain was going to the cinema to watch.

The plot of I'll Turn to You - the struggles of a war-time serviceman to adjust to life as a civilian - might be a timeless one, but it's treatment here is too dated to be relevant today. Terry Randall is the faithful wife who tries to stand by Don Stannard as he slowly goes off the rails. Irene Handl provides some welcome comic relief as their accommodating landlady, but the ill-judged musical interludes and rushed ending prove fatal.

Denis Gifford in 'The British Film Catalogue' actually categorises this studio-bound but affecting dramatisation of the financial tribulations suffered by a returning ex-flyer (played by Don Stannard, later Hammer Films' Dick Barton before being killed in a car crash in 1949), while his wife wards off the blandishments of flush Ellis Irving, as a MUSICAL on the strength of the musical digressions that bookend it and sugar the pill of it's dramatisation of the obstacles he faces reestablishing himself in postwar austerity Britain. (The problems he encounters will be familiar to those who saw impecunious Douglass Montgomery and Dana Andrews suffer equivalent indignities in 'Little Man, What Now?' and 'The Best Years of Our Lives'.)

This is an interesting film in that it deals with the problems beset by many servicemen when they returned home after world war 2.The problem with this film is that there are too many musical interludes which rather water down the drama.Also the solutions here are far too pat.I would reckon that the majority of servicemen returning home did not have the alternatives offered to Don Stannard.There is the major problem that he has had 6 years taken out of his life and at 24 he has to start back where he was at the outbreak of war .I knew someone who never got over his wartime experiences and I could imagine that it must have made uncomfortable viewing for many of the people who watched this in the cinema when the film was released.