THE LIGHT THAT FAILED (1939)

A windswept coastline in England, 1865. Young Dick Heldar and his friend Maisie are playing with guns (!) when Maisie accidentally fires toward Dick, resulting in him getting a gunpowder burn near his eye—it's painful but not debilitating. This is to be their last summer together as she's sent off to school, but both vow to grow up and become great artists. Years later, Heldar (Ronald Colman) is a newspaper illustrator and he's in the Sudan with his war correspondent buddy Torpenhow (Walter Huston). While saving Torpenhow's life from a spear attack, he sustains a head wound near the same eye that was injured years ago. After recuperating in Port Said, he is called back to London with news that his war paintings are going over gung ho with the public. This acclaim goes to his head and he devotes himself to selling popular illustration work rather than the classier paintings he is capable of. At the zoo, he runs into Maisie who has become an artist, though a struggling one. Both Maisie and Torpenhow (who lives across the hall from Heldar) urge him to work toward finer things, but he can't give up the easy money he makes. Maisie leaves for Paris and soon Heldar has taken up with a cheap Cockney bargirl and probably part-time prostitute named Bessie (Ida Lupino); she's actually in love with Torpenhow but Heldar scotches that. As he works on what he assumes will be his masterpiece, a portrait of Bessie as the personification of melancholy, he begins a slow descent into blindness due to his war wound. But the worst is yet to come when Bessie, horrified at the portrait, defaces it; he, now completely blind, still thinks it could be his masterpiece, but his friends know it won't.

Based on a Rudyard Kipling novel—though it reminded me more of Somerset Maugham—this film, which was well thought of in its time, has become a dated period piece, the kind of stuffy, slow-moving movie that I imagine young people who don't watch black & white movies think all classic movies are like. I hold Colman (pictured with Lupino) at fault; I generally find him stiff and sluggish, and when his character is supposed to be stiff and sluggish (as in CHAMPAGNE FOR CAESAR or THE LATE GEORGE APLEY), he's good.  I think he gives his best performance in LOST HORIZON where his natural stiffness works well playing a man who becomes somewhat heroic despite himself. But here, Colman makes Heldar a drip, someone whom I don't want to watch a movie about. The supporting cast is better, especially Huston and Lupino. I was quite restless through the last half, but the beautifully shot final scene almost made it worth my time. This film doesn’t crop up a lot, but I don’t think that's a loss to film history. [TCM]