Forever Amber

It's 1644 and Civil War grips England. Baby Amber is found at the doorstep of a puritan family in the countryside. She is the product of a scandal from opposing sides of the war. It's 1660. Oliver Cromwell is dead and the monarchy is restored. Amber (Linda Darnell) refuses an arranged marriage and longs for a high class life. She uses her sex to social climb her way to the top. She follows a group of Royalist led by Lord Bruce Carlton (Cornel Wilde) and his friend Lord Almsbury to London. Her journey would take her to the court of King Charles II. Bruce gets her privateering ship. She gets pregnant and sent to debtors' prison where she joins highwayman Black Jack Mallard. They escape prison and go on their crime spree. Jack is killed and she is rescued by Captain Rex Morgan who introduced her to acting in the theater. That's where she reconnects with Lord Almsbury who is now married with a child. She continues to social climb as she pines for her true love Bruce.

This is based on a period-piece romance novel. The name that caught my eye is director Otto Preminger. It's three years after his stylistic masterpiece Laura. It's the days of the powerful studio head and Zanuck had him under contract. He is given this prestige affair with a big budget. The material is rather scandalous at the time which Zanuck used with the expected censor opposition. It's nothing nowadays and this costume affair seems rather stiff. I don't know much about Linda Darnell. She seems to have a long and varied career with this as one of her highlights. She's beautiful and she's doing some broad acting. This is reminiscent of the style of Gone with The Wind except it is far inferior. It's rather pulpy where the sexual opportunism wears out its salacious welcome. It's compelling enough to watch but I don't find the ambitious Amber to be that appealing.

Just watched "Forever Amber" the other night on TCM and it was very riveting! I had seen this movie many many years before, and I do vividly recall the final scene when Amber from her window, was watching Carleton and son leaving for Virginia. The movie from the other night closed abruptly with Amber closing the window and the credits appeared. Something didn't seem right! I remember years ago, Amber getting some kind of invitation from the palace, and she immediately shifted her attention from Carleton and the boy to the royal invitation without another thought to her former lover. That scene defined Amber St.Clair in all its essence.

If Forever Amber were being made today the results would have been quite different. Without The Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency inspecting all the product that came from Hollywood, Amber St. Clair's sexual escapades during Restoration Great Britain would have been a far better film. Still it's not bad as it is.

Another reviewer compared it to Gone With the Wind. You can look at that in two ways, the interaction between Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde and compare it to Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Lots of similarities there. But also the book itself was a blockbuster best seller in the Forties as Gone With the Wind was in the previous decade and brought in a built-in audience.

Kathleen Winsor when she wrote the novel was married to her first husband a football player who was a history student. For his honor's thesis he was writing about the Stuart Restoration. From his research material, Winsor became fascinated with the period and created her novel.

20th Century Fox and Otto Preminger got the rights and did a fine job in recreating the United Kingdom of the 1660s. Linda Darnell got one of her best roles in her career as Amber, a high spirited and vivacious girl like Scarlett O'Hara, who finds true love, but sacrifices it for ambition.

In class conscious times as those were there were few venues for people to rise, even less if you were a woman. Darnell rises from Newgate Prison to the court of Charles II where she becomes one of Charles's numerous mistresses. Along the way she uses many men, like highwayman John Russell, army captain Glenn Langan, nobleman Richard Haydn and even her own true love nobleman Cornel Wilde with whom she has a son out of wedlock.

Presiding over it all is a world weary and cynical George Sanders who plays Charles II. Sanders would play The Merry Monarch in another and vastly inferior film called The King's Thief. He does capture the jaded cynicism of Charles II so very well, it's one of his top five career parts.

If the title role in the film were about the male lead Bruce Carlton, I'm sure Darryl Zanuck would have cast Tyrone Power in the part as he appeared in several films opposite Linda Darnell. Instead Cornel Wilde steps in and he's a most dashing Restoration nobleman and seeker of fortune in the New World.

The most spellbinding performance and so against type is that of Richard Haydn as the elderly rake, Lord Radcliff. He's a widower who's looking for a 17th century trophy wife and finds one in Linda who at the point in time he first meets her is an actress. He's a coldblooded person of mystery and menace and really registers it well on the screen. He marries Linda and she inherits his title when he dies.

Haydn is killed in a thrilling scene involving the great fire of London which occurred in 1666. It's the highlight of the film and I can't say any more about how and why he's killed, but trust me it was one deserved end.

Though Forever Amber is a good film, it could have been far better, but for censorship problems. Still it provides Darnell, Sanders, and Haydn with some of their best career parts and is worth seeing.

I tried reading Kathleen Windsor's famous novel but found it too long and full of excess baggage. It didn't capture my attention the way that other famous historical novel, "Gone with the Wind" did.

And while I can't say I liked this film as much as GWTW, it was nevertheless very entertaining and held my interest the way the book couldn't. There was enough history, drama, romance and intrigue to make it worthwhile, without going overboard and getting bogged down with unnecessary detail and incidents.

What was most interesting about Amber (Linda Darnell at her best) was how you can understand her motives without having to agree with them, like her unwillingness to give up on Bruce, who had more than one opportunity to make an "honest woman" of her but didn't want to take them. At times, she does what she has to do, at others, she chooses her options. Her ambitions and schemes never get her what she truly wants, despite her rise in social position and material wealth.

Cornell Wilde gives a good performance as Bruce Carlton, the love of Amber's life, who prefers his freedom, at least where she's concerned.

I also liked George Sanders as King Charles II, who falls for Amber's charms, yet won't be anyone's fool.

Very entertaining!

Overlong, overwrought romantic epic that lacks chemistry between the leads. Linda Darnell is passable as Amber -- if not stunningly talented, then at least gifted with screen presence. But Cornell Wilde is as flat as a wet blanket, dousing the fire out of every scene where it might possibly have ignited. Most errors in movies of this type can be overlooked if the attraction between the two lovers is palpable. Sadly, there is no indication that Wilde's Carlton even likes Amber, let alone finds her alluring. Production code aside, there were plenty of movies of this period that portrayed believable epic love, and this isn't one of them.

The real highlight here is George Sanders as the licentious Charles II, a part he was born to play. I have no doubt that Vincent Price, considered for the role, could have done well (he gave the best performance of his career in another Preminger movie, "Laura"), but Sanders brings so much dripping wit and irony to everything he does that he makes every scene he's in come alive. He's not in it much, however.

The production itself is pretty good, some great costumes and sets. The swordfighting scene (with thankfully little dialogue) was excellent and far too short. The story itself is a little choppy. The first scene was a non-sequitur, promising a potentially interesting plot device that never came. And the ending was a complete disaster - abrupt, unresolved, unbalanced, and worst of all, unsatisfying. Overall, the movie leaves a sour taste in the mouth, as if the decadence that was portrayed somehow got hold of the people making it and caused them to focus more on the image than on the story.