Green Dolphin Street

Elizabeth Goudge’s novel won the prize Louis B. Mayer had put up for a book worth filming, and the studio duly threw everything it had at the story. Two sisters growing up in an island town love the same man; years after he has fled to New Zealand he writes home one drunken night asking for a wife, and puts down the wrong sister’s name. A whole life is then built on that single error. The most discussed passage is the earthquake, staged with miniatures and with mirrors agitated on a lake in Oregon, which won the Academy Award for special effects in 1948. Bronislau Kaper’s title theme left the film behind entirely and became a permanent fixture of the jazz repertoire.