Waterloo Bridge (1940)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) I can’t say that I was all that impressed by Waterloo Bridge—playing from grand riffs on old-school themes such as a tragic wartime romance, it’s clearly meant to move audiences, give the filmmakers some space to stretch their “serious movie” muscles and (incidentally) court after the same audience that went flocking to the earlier 1931 film. By a stroke of good luck, the project attracted talent such as director Mervyn LeRoy, Viven Leigh and Robert Taylor, and the darkening news from the United Kingdom in the early days of the war added heft to the result. For modern audience, Waterloo Bridge plays as an old-fashioned weeper, perhaps a bit more daring than most considering that prostitution is a plot element of the heroine’s downfall and that the ending is a downer of significant proportions.