Peter Ibbetson

As a boy Peter was a neighbour to a girl in Paris; then they were separated and forgot each other. Years later, working as an architect in London, he meets a duke's wife. She is that girl. The affair ends in a killing and he is sentenced to life. From then on the two meet only in their dreams, and build a life there. The subject is not love but a dream being accepted as real. The film never implies that the meetings are imagined; the dream scenes are shot with the same seriousness as the waking ones and the question of which is real is left with the viewer. The form leans on studio design. In the dream sections the perspective distorts, spaces are built at slightly wrong scale, and the light source is unclear. Those distortions are the reason for the film's present reputation. The strange part is who claimed it. The surrealists in France declared it a surrealist work; André Breton and his circle took it up directly and Luis Buñuel was still speaking of it years later. It had been made as an ordinary Hollywood romantic drama. Gary Cooper plays Peter and Ann Harding the woman. Henry Hathaway directs. Who it is for: viewers curious about classical-era fantastic romance and surrealism. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a logical plot; from a point onwards the narrative surrenders entirely to dream.