Heat and cold The story began on a snowy January morning in 1919 at the back door of Mr. and Mrs. Ward's home. Confirming the proverb that those who have little are most willing to share, the owners let a strange but very active woman named Hannah into the house. At first glance, she happened to be nearby and magically fit into the cheerful and full of funny incidents life of the Ward family. Skillfully picking up the key to everyone in this house, Hannah did not reveal to them her main goal - to be closer to their neighbor's son, who is connected to her in a very non-trivial way.
“White Banners” can be called a Christmas fairy tale, pleasantly standing out against the background of pathetically composed and pompously filmed tapes of the late thirties – early forties. This is not a romantic story of love and suffering in the spirit of Garbo and not a large-scale Teknicolor canvas with a stake on sound and color. No, this is a modest black and white (even, rather, “white”, given the amount of plaster snow in the frame) adaptation of the novel by Lloyd Douglas, released a couple of years earlier. A piece of life of a provincial family, generously seasoned with ingenious inventions and maternal instinct, miniature and cozy.
Brought to the fore by Faye Bainter in the role of Hannah in some places, perhaps, looks a little played in her selfless aspirations to help everyone and everyone. She can be excused for the fact that this is almost flawless groundwork for the Oscars, because the American Film Academy is just such female images and favors. A cheerful optimist with a note of tragedy, enough to touch the viewer, but not overdo it and not spoil our fairy tale. Young Jackie Cooper as Peter tries to show the evolution of a boy into a man, but in this he is not helped by the uneven character of his hero, who literally throws from extreme to extreme. Sloppy and daddy’s son is next to a talented chemist and a reasonable young man, and these masks replace each other several times in one scene. More or less this balances the presence of Claude Raines, looking at whom you forget about lost children, and about someone’s role as a villain. Indeed, Raines here indulges us with an outlandish thing, namely, himself in the role of a beautiful father of the family and an eccentric inventor. A loving spouse, a mentor of young minds and a sympathetic friend in one bottle! Is it Raines who cold-bloodedly takes the lives of unfaithful wives and treacherously frames his best friends, who frightens, hypnotizes and beckons to the dark side? His temperament makes itself felt in a single scene where he breaks half of his laboratory in a fit of despair. Or, perhaps, his sly raised eyebrow in the next conversation will remind him of how insidious his possessor can be. Reigns is gentlemanly not pulling on the blanket, giving the youth and Bainter a full-blown turn, but there is no doubt about who leads here.
The only significant disadvantage of the “Banner” was and remains their rarity. Finding this movie is quite problematic unless you're a TCM regular. In Russian, the film, of course, is not duplicated, although it is high time to include it in the section of the New Year classics and make a nice bonus in retrospectives of the great and terrible Claude Raines.