Unusual movie.

The Flutchman got this right but I must have missed this one. Saw it for the first time recently and was very pleased. The fact is, if Ann Blyth is in it, I want to see it and I am very glad I got to see this. Not sure it, or similar, couldn't be filmed today. True, we are terribly cynical but even the cynics among us (including me) need to escape reality every so often.

Three or four years after seeing this film I finally saw the original version, Berkeley Square (1933), that my late friend, The Dying Flutchman, mentioned in his 2010 post above.

It's quite good, although Leslie Howard as a visiting American (!) isn't very convincing, and the film is entirely in black & white -- it doesn't switch to color for the past sequences. (Three-strip Technicolor was just finishing development that year.) Overall I'd say the Power version is more basic and straightforward in its approach, the Howard one more ethereal and subtle. But the fundamental theme, of a naïve 20th-century romantic rudely surprised by the coarseness of the 18th-century world he'd imagined as so genteel, is the same. The absence of the "nuclear" background in the '33 film gives it a more dream-like aura than the rather harshly topical backstory in the '51.

I'd like to see the 1933 version come out on the Fox Cinema Archives line some day. It generally gets better reviews than Power's film. But either one is a fascinating picture.