Seven Days Leave

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.

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 Days' Leave" is based on James M Barrie's play 'The Old Lady Shows Her Medals'. The title change is interesting, as it moves the play's emphasis from the old-lady character (Sarah Ann Dowey) to the soldier (Private Dowey) who visits her on his furlough from the trenches. The soldier is played (very well) by Gary Cooper, and the original advertising campaign for this film made it clear that 'Coop' was the star of this movie, with the old lady firmly a supporting role. But in fact Sarah Dowey is still the central character in this maudlin drama, even though the screenplay builds up Private Dowey's character.

I viewed this film in 1992 through the kind assistance of film scholar William K Everson, who had a restored print in his collection. Mr Everson and I both had some trepidation in watching this film, as the central character of Mrs Dowey is played by Beryl Mercer, whom William Everson and I agreed is the single most annoying performer in the entire history of motion pictures. Mercer specialised in maudlin tear-stained performances, all trembling and whines and heaving bosoms. The fact that "Seven Days' Leave" has a maudlin plot line in its own right seemed to threaten that Mercer's performance would be even more bathetic than usual. James M Barrie's plot lines veered towards the diabetic, and this one is no exception. But I was curious to see Gary Cooper's performance. As Mr Everson himself had not viewed this film in more than 20 years, our mutual curiosity won out. "Seven Days' Leave" turns out to be better than I'd thought. Cooper gives an impressive performance, and Mercer's maudlin moaning is less obtrusive than I had feared, due to the fact that this story has some legitimate tear-jerking to do.

SYNOPSIS CONTAINS SPOILERS. Sarah Ann Dowey (Mercer) is an elderly charwoman in London during the Great War. She cries herself 'Mrs' Dowey, but in fact she never married and is childless. (Apparently an elderly widow commanded more respect in 1914 than an elderly spinster.) The other three scrubwomen who char with Mrs Dowey - Mesdames Mickelham, Haggerty and Twymley - all have sons in uniform, and Mrs Dowey feels left out ... until she spots a newspaper despatch mentioning Private Kenneth Dowey of the Canadian Black Watch. (In the original play, the soldier was Scottish: here he's been made Canadian so that Gary Cooper won't have to attempt a Scottish accent.) Mrs Dowey tells her neighbours and co-workers that this soldier is her son. She then proceeds to send him letters and cakes, which she claims are from 'Lady Dolly Kanister', apparently a genuine person. (I guarantee that no peeress was ever named Dolly, much less Kanister.) She reads to the other charwomen extracts from 'letters' she receives from her 'son'; these are really blank paper.

The well-meaning Reverend Willings, believing that Pvt Dowey is genuinely Mrs Dowey's son, arranges for them to meet. Private Dowey (Cooper) is astonished to learn that this scrubwoman is his 'Lady Dolly' benefactress. There is a genuinely touching scene in which Dowey tells her that he is an orphan, while Mrs Dowey excitedly recalls her 'memories' of young Kenneth's boyhood. These 'memories' are all her own invention, yet she has genuinely persuaded herself that this handsome soldier is her son whom she has raised from birth, and that these memories are real. Like Martha in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', Mrs Dowey has given herself a pathetic fantasy of motherhood, and now she inhabits it so fully that she believes it is real.

This screenplay opens up the original play considerably, as Private Dowey now takes his 'mother' to the theatre and to a restaurant, where they sup champagne. (He must be getting a general's wages.) By the time his leave is up, these two people have touchingly accepted each other as mother and son. Private Dowey returns to the front, where he soon volunteers for a mission to eliminate a German machine-gun nest. He dies a hero ... and his posthumous medal is given to his mother, Sarah Ann Dowey.

"Seven Days' Leave" could have become dangerously bathetic, yet it works much better than I had expected, and this is largely down to Gary Cooper's splendid performance. The screenplay dilutes much of James M Barrie's twee-ness, and I expect that cynical John Farrow deserves the credit for this. Beryl Mercer gives (by her standards) a surprisingly restrained performance; the very underrated director Richard Wallace deserves praise for this. Daisy Belmore is quite good as one of Mercer's sister charwomen. I was expecting "Seven Days' Leave" to be a wallow in treacle, but it's far less cloying than I'd expected. I'll rate this movie 7 points out of 10, mostly for Cooper's performance, Wallace's directing, and the screenplay.

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.