Perfect Strangers

A married couple leading a dull life in London, thoroughly tired of each other, are called up separately when the war comes: he into the navy, she into the women's service. Over the years both of them change. They become people with confidence, with work, with friends, even with better looks. Then leave comes round and they have to go home. Both of them dread the reunion. Alexander Korda's film tells the war not at the front but through what it did to people. Conscription here looks as much like a release as like a disaster, and the film carries that double feeling all the way through. Clemence Dane's story won the Academy Award for best original story. In America it was shown as Vacation from Marriage, with Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr in the leads.