Junto a mi corazón

This is a pretty good little film about a couple adopting a baby. It works best when it is looking at the couple at home dealing with the new child, or when they adopt a puppy as a substitute. This is all quite charming and although Gene Tierney is a little cloyingly sweet at times (and I might add ravishingly beautiful), Ray Milland is very good. Where the film is less successful is when it traces Milland's search for the baby's real parents - this all becomes a tad melodramatic. And Fay Bainter's oh-so-well-meaning adoption agency supervisor comes over as so mean and heartless in her treatment of Tierney that the film becomes unbelievable. She tortures the poor woman! Milland's final impassioned monologue to Bainter is impossible for any actor to play but Milland has a good stab at it. Overall very entertaining.

Please help me to purchase this movie, if it is available. Ray Milland and Gene Tierney were excellent and the plot was played very well. I checked once to purchase the movie but was told it wasn't available for some reason or another. It has been 30 years since I saw it, I have always wanted to see it again. I have told my wife and kids about ti as well, and they too want to see it. I hope someone will be able to let me in on whether or not and where I can buy the VHS or DVD copy. This movie was based on a reporter and his wife's challenge to adopt a baby. When someone mentions to the reporter, Ray Milland, that he needed to be careful as to not get a bad seed, he almost ruins the happy moment.

Thanks

I give this movie 10 stars because I appreciate a storyline that promotes adoption!

I think adoption is a beautiful thing and I like that the wife character in this movie wasn't hung up on the idea that she had to give birth to a baby in order to be a mother.

I don't fault the husband character for his investigative work to research the abandoned baby's background; and while his quest for the truth causes friction, I like that it results in marital growth rather than separation.

I recommend this movie for anyone who enjoys the actors (Ray Milland and Gene Tierney) along with a happy ending. Thanks to TCM for airing it!

Housewife Gene Tierney cannot have a baby, and does not want to wait two years until the adoption agency makes one available to her. Columnist Ray Milland, on the other hand, goes into passive-aggressive mode, when Tierney, acting on a tip from a friend, offers to adopt a baby simply dropped off at the local police station. Will Milland's zealous attempts at finding out the true parentage of the baby cause Faye Bainter's quietly authoritarian adoption agency to determine that Milland and Tierny are unfit to hold little baby Danny CLOSE TO MY HEART?

1951 was one of the peak years of the baby boom, and this movie is a fascinating window into an era in which a woman wanting "a baby for every room" was not thought to be unusual. Tierney, in her single-minded desire to get herself a nice newborn baby right now, without delay, feels more than a little neurotic, to this modern viewer's eyes. Bet she was viewed as just normal, back then. Milland, who seems to have no problem being childless, appears to be the more normal character, even when he gets a little obsessed about finding out where this baby he's adopting actually came from. I think the movie makers were trying to get us to think he was the weird one. Faye Bainter, who plays the caseworker from the adoption agency, does a dead on interpretation of a sweet-seeming, but ultimately rather cold bureaucrat.

The quality of the acting is exemplified towards the end, when Milland comes home to a quietly angry Tierney. The dynamic of a somewhat oblivious husband who suddenly realizes he may have totally destroyed his relationship, and an equally oblivious wife who has manipulated herself into thinking divorce for the first time in her life, is rarely this realistically portrayed.

This is worth seeing, mostly for the acting, and the unusual for the day subject matter. If you want noir or tough guys, though, look elsewhere. This is almost the 50s equivalent of a movie that would play on Lifetime.

This rather obscure little film from '51 must have been one that attracted GENE TIERNEY, given the circumstances of her private life wherein her own parentage problems came about when her pregnancy resulted in a child born mentally retarded. She puts her heart and soul into her performance here, as the obsessive wife who "must" have a child to call her own regardless of where the child comes from. Hubby RAY MILLAND is more realistic about things and wants to know the background of any infant they adopt.

While she falls completely in love with the adopted infant boy, Milland, who is a newspaper columnist, decides to do his own research into the baby's real parents. Therein, the story takes a few melodramatic turns before the domestic problems are ironed out.

FAY BAINTER is excellent as the head of an adoption agency who wants to make sure both parents are right for the child. Her scenes with Tierney are sensitively played and well scripted. Tierney looks ravishing and there is no trace of the illness which would overtake her career in a few short years.

Milland has some good moments, especially toward the end when he has his final confrontation with Bainter, insisting that he's no longer holding the baby's criminal father as a factor in not signing the final adoption papers, having met with the man in prison and realizing that heredity is not going to poison the child.

Although the presentation is an intelligent enough one, there is the flavor of a Lifetime TV movie to the production (by today's standards), and it verges on being daytime soap opera in quality more than once. But fans of Gene Tierney and Ray Milland will like their performances in this one.

A nice background score by Max Steiner helps, as does the direction of William Keighley.