Journey for Margaret

An American newspaperman and his wife reach London in the first days of the war. She is wounded by shrapnel in a raid, loses the child they were expecting and goes back to America. Worn down by the war, he is made to write a piece about war orphans, and there he meets Margaret. W. S. Van Dyke directed, from a screenplay by David Hertz and William Ludwig based on William Lindsay White’s 1941 book. White had in fact adopted a war orphan and taken her back to America, and wrote the book about it. Margaret is played by the five-year-old Margaret O’Brien; it was her first film and it made her the best known child actor in the country almost overnight. Franz Waxman wrote the music.