Seven Days Leave

I don't disagree in any substantial way with the other reviewers. I only wish they had separate ratings for the physical quality in which this one fares poorly. I don't know if it was a low budget production. The print I saw was a bad copy or if all the surviving prints are bad and this was the best of them.

Were it not for the sound and images that went from being too dark to washed out I'd have given it an 8.

This film has nothing whatever to do with the film of the same title made in 1942, which has a different story altogether. This film set in London is based on the play 'The Old Lady Shows Her Medals' by J. M. Barrie, author of 'Peter Pan'. The film is remarkable for a spectacularly moving performance by the tiny (less than five feet tall) actress Beryl Mercer (1882-1939). Although she was only 48 years old when she made the film, she was made up to look much older and more pitiful. She had played this part on stage and so had learned how to inhabit the character to an uncanny degree. It is hard to believe she is acting. Some people have commented that because of her mannerisms in other films, she was an annoying actress, but I did not find her so at all in this film. She plays opposite Gary Cooper, 29, in his first speaking film role, and you can imagine the contrast of the tiny woman with the six foot two inch Cooper. The story is pathetic in the extreme, and Barrie, who was nothing if not sentimental, obviously wanted to squeeze some tears out of people, and he certainly produced a real tear-jerker here. The story is set during the First World War, apparently rather early in the War, because cynicism amongst the British has not yet set in, and they are still madly, hysterically patriotic, with all the women wanting eagerly to send their sons to fight and die for their country. (No one yet realized that the First World War was fought for no rational reason, but was a totally insane and pointless exercise in futility.) Beryl Mercer plays a cleaning lady named Sarah Ann Dowey who has never been married but has always longed for a son. All her cleaning lady friends, brilliantly portrayed by three wonderful British character actresses (Daisy Belmore, Nora Cecil and Tempe Piggott) boast about having sons who are at the Front, though whether they even have sons is doubtful, and they may have made it all up (Beryl Mercer has recently moved to their neighbourhood and would not know). Mercer is shown early on going round to every support organisation offering her services for her country and always being turned away because she is too old. She is not only depressed that no one will let her do anything to aid the War Effort, but even more so that she has no son to send to fight. She spots a small item in a newspaper about a young soldier in the Scottish Black Watch Regiment whose name is Kenneth Dowey, the same surname as herself. She creates a fantasy where he is her son, and tells her friends about how brave he is, and how often he writes to her. She steals postmarked envelopes from the waste baskets she is emptying and alters them so that they bear her own name and address, and shows them to the other cleaning ladies as the envelopes from her 'son'. She writes to the soldier and sends him cakes. Then he gets a seven days' leave from the Front to return to London, where he knows no one. So he decides to visit the woman to tell her to stop writing to him, as he is an orphan with no family and who does she think she is. However, she offers him tea and cake and is so sweet and pathetic and loving that he takes to her and he accepts her offer to stay in her flat, as he has nowhere else to go. She tells him she has told everyone that he is her son, so he decides to go along with it. She is so proud as she walks along the street with her giant 'son' beside her in uniform. Being in the Black Watch, he wears a kilt rather than trousers, and she jokes about his hairy legs. This is certainly the only time Gary Cooper wore a kilt in a film. All of Mercer's friends in the neighbourhood have their jaws drop at the sight of the amazing 'son' whom none of them had believed really existed. Cooper becomes genuinely attached to her and says that when he returns to his Regiment he will register her as his next of kin, which he does. Cooper experiences what it is like to have a family member for the first time. They go out and have wonderful times together. He even takes her to the grandest restaurant which any of them have ever heard of, which is called the Imperial, where they have champagne and dance, and she becomes tipsy and as she is dancing, she says ecstatically to Cooper 'Oh, Kenneth, I'm flying, I'm flying!' Mercer has an endearing and heart-rending child-like quality. The pathos of her character and the situation could not be greater. They both agree that they will after all be 'mother and son', as they realize they are both what each had always wanted. Then his seven days' leave is up and he has to return to the Front. The rest of the story must not be told because one does not reveal endings on the database. This is a deeply moving film, played with such honesty and innocence by Beryl Mercer, and with such directness by Cooper, that it transcends sentimentality and becomes something much more than that. It is a forgotten gem which should be less forgotten. It is also a record of a time and a place and a mood which need always to be kept in memory, the early days of that terrible First World War, one of the greatest tragedies of the human race. The director was Richard Wallace (1894-1951), who two years later directed THUNDER BELOW (1932) with Tallulah Bankhead, but whose best known film is probably THE FALLEN SPARROW (1943) with John Garfield and Maureen O'Hara.

Seven Day's Leave was actually Gary Cooper's first all talking film, but Adolph Zukor at Paramount decided to hold up the release of it until after The Virginian was on the big screen. I'm guessing that Zukor must have thought that if The Virginian were not a surefire hit for Gary Cooper with that western drawl of his, Seven Days Leave would tank at the box office. But The Virginian was a big hit and in early 1930 Paramount released Seven Day's Leave and Gary Cooper's career in sound was assured.

Seven Days Leave is a screen adaption of one of James M. Barrie's plays, The Old Lady Shows Her Medals. And it's one of the saddest stories I've ever seen on screen and stage. It's New York premier was in 1917 and Beryl Mercer who plays the title role recreates the part she did on Broadway.

Beryl Mercer plays a charwoman, someone who has passed through most of life without making any kind of mark. Though she calls herself is Mrs. Dowey in fact she's never been married, has no family at all and to keep up with her peers, the other charwomen, brags about a son she never had who is serving in the Scottish Black Watch. In fact she read about a soldier in the Black Watch with her last name and showing it to her fellow charwomen, she claims this as her son. She even sends him cakes she bakes and corresponds with him.

Of course when Gary Cooper gets leave and goes looking for the woman who's been writing him, he gets quite the shock. But he too is a person without home or family ties and the two of them kind of adopt each other until his leave is up and he has to return to France.

Casting Cooper in this role may have been assured when he scored a success in The Shopworn Angel playing an American doughboy. If you recall that film was later remade by MGM with James Stewart in the role that Cooper originated on the silent screen. Of course to explain Cooper's distinctly American speech pattern, he was made a Canadian, the first time maybe in sound films that plot device was used. It was used again for Cooper when he was Lives Of The Bengal Lancers.

Beryl Mercer is probably best known on screen for playing James Cagney's mother in Public Enemy which would come the following year for her. But in fact this one might be her signature role. Mercer is a person taken best in small doses, but her usual cloying personality is well suited for this kind of part. And Barrie as author did a good job in writing about someone who most of us wouldn't separate from the scenery and he gives her a heart and soul.

Seven Day's Leave and the play it's based on is a two person story, the other characters themselves don't really register. It's not a play likely to be revived today, it is a much dated story. Still it's sad and touching about two lonely people connecting in World War I Great Britain.

And you get to see Gary Cooper wear a kilt.

Gary Cooper is a member of the Black Watch wounded in action. While he convalesces, charwoman Beryl Mercer adopts him to compete in bulge with her friends, all of whose sons are in the army. When Cooper gets leave, he heads to London to set her straight, but finds himself playing her son.

It's based on James Barrie's THE OLD LADY SHOWS HER MEDALS, and is not, alas, a very successful effort. While well cast, this is still, so far as Paramount's West Coast division is concerned, still early days for talkies, and the dialogue proceeds at a glacial pace and Miss Mercer milks her lines for maximal sentiment.

Based on the play The Old Lady Shows Her Medals by J. M. Barrie. Beryl Mercer stars as Sarah Ann Dowey, a old maid charwoman in London during World War One. She has no children serving in the war, which makes her an outcast among her peers, so she pretends to have a son who is on the front lines. When a local do-gooder sees Canadian soldier Kenneth Downey (Gary Cooper) on leave, he thinks that Kenneth must be Sarah Ann's son. At first angered by the old woman's charade, Kenneth soon feels pity for her and agrees to go along with the ruse. Over the course of his seven days' leave, the two form a lasting bond.

Mercer has starred in the original Broadway production of the play back in 1917, and she's very good here. Aside from a couple of awkward line readings, Cooper is believable and sympathetic. Seeing a surrogate mother-son relationship in a major Hollywood film is not very common, even during this period, so this was an expected fresh take on the War.