The Enchanted Cottage

A soldier comes home from the war with his face badly scarred and shuts himself away in the country cottage he had rented for his honeymoon, wanting to be seen by nobody. The maid working in the house is somebody who thinks herself plain and whom nobody looks at either. The two slowly get used to each other and decide to marry, more out of loneliness than love. Then something unexpected happens: they start to look beautiful to each other. John Cromwell directed it from Arthur Wing Pinero's play. What changes is not the faces but the looking, and the film offers that not as a trick but as a description of what love does. To anyone outside, nothing has changed at all, and that is where the pain sits. Dorothy McGuire and Robert Young keep their playing stripped down; Herbert Marshall's blind pianist functions as the narrator.