The Enchanted Cottage (RKO, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 6) my husband Charles and I watched an alternately intriguing and frustrating film from RKO in 1945 called The Enchanted Cottage, based on a play by British dramatist Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, who premiered it in 1920 and called it “a fable in three acts.” It was first filmed in 1924 by First National with Richard Barthelmess as star and John S. Robertson (best known today for the 1920 John Barrymore silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) as director. Not surprisingly, the original play took place in Sussex, England in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II). In 1945 RKO remade it with John Cromwell as director and Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire as stars. They were coming off the success of a 1943 film called Claudia, about the trials and tribulations of a young newlywed couple adjusting to married life, which McGuire (though not Young) had previously done on stage as a play. RKO’s producer, Harriet Parsons (who nearly lost the assignment to Dudley Nichols and had to fight the studio brass to stay on the film), and her writers, DeWitt Bodeen and Herman J. Mankiewicz (who came on for a last-minute rewrite just before the shooting started), moved the story to the U.S., to New England, and set it in an otherwise destroyed or ruined mansion of which only a cottage survived. The property’s former owner had made it a practice to rent the cottage to newlywed couples on their honeymoons, allowing them to stay as long as they liked, but the current owner, Abigail Minnett (Mildred Natwick in quite a good performance), has ended the practice. Previous couples have etched their names and dates when they lived there onto the cottage’s windows. The latest tenants are Oliver Bradford (Robert Young) and his fiancée Beatrice Alexander (Hillary Brooke, who frankly is too strong a personality for the nothing role she’s playing here; I liked her a lot better as the black-hearted villainess and partner of Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green, made the same year with Basil Rathbone as Holmes, Nigel Bruce as Watson, and Henry Daniell as Moriarty). When Oliver borrows the engagement ring he’s given Beatrice and tries to use it to etch their names on the window, the stone falls out and Mrs. Minnett tells them they’re not supposed to do that yet since they haven’t actually married.

The date is December 7, 1941, and when the Pearl Harbor attack happens that very day Oliver becomes a pilot with the U.S. Army Air Corps (it wasn’t until 1955 that the U.S. Air Force became a separate service branch of its own). Mrs. Minnett is herself a war widow; her husband was killed in the Great War and she’s kept her desk calendar set to April 6, 1917, the date the U.S. formally entered World War I. The whole story is framed as a flashback narrated by Major John Hillgrove (Herbert Marshall), who was blinded while serving in the Great War and took up piano playing and musical composition as part of his recovery process. I couldn’t help but note that Marshall is playing a man who became disabled as a result of World War I when the war had disabled him in real life as well, though instead of going blind he’d lost his left leg in the Second Battle of Arras, France. (To add to the irony, Marshall’s war injury occurred on April 9, 1917, just three days after the date on Mrs. Minnett’s calendar.) Oliver returns to the cottage a year later with his face badly scarred by an accident from when his plane was shot down in combat in the Pacific theatre. There he takes up with Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire), a homely woman whom Mrs. Minnett had hired years before as a maid. The two not-quite-attractive people are gradually drawn together and ultimately fall in love and get married, despite each of them having anxieties that the other has married them only out of pity. Hillgrove regularly visits the cottage with his nephew, Danny “Taxi” Stanton (Alec Englander), leading him. As he would the next year in the ponderous Tyrone Power vehicle The Razor’s Edge, Marshall as Hillgrove is the voice of sanity in this rather mixed set of emotions and frequently prattles on about spirituality and the life beyond this one. Laura and Oliver announce that they’ve gone through a physical transformation that’s made them both beautiful, or at least conventionally attractive – only the sudden appearance of Oliver’s mother, Violet Price (Spring Byington), and stepfather Frederick Price (Richard Gaines), breaks the illusion and their images in the movie revert to the ones we’ve been seeing all movie.

Hillgrove narrates all this in flashback during a party which he’s giving in Oliver’s and Laura’s honor and at which he’s going to play a piano reduction of the new tone poem, “The Enchanted Cottage,” which he’s written in their honor. Unfortunately they’re late coming to their own party and Hillgrove has to fill in for them by narrating their story and playing the piece (with Max Rabinowitz as his piano double). Ultimately Oliver and Laura etch their names on the window of the cottage and then show up at Hillgrove’s party declaring their undying love for each other. I looked up the Wikipedia page on Pinero’s play and learned not only that the original was set in England (as I had guessed from the fact that no one drinks coffee in the film; all the characters’ hot drink of choice is tea) but it had a much greater supernatural element. In the original play we never get to see Oliver (whose last name is the clunkier “Bashforth”) before he’s disabled, and his injuries are quite a bit more severe. According to Wikipedia, “In the stage directions, Oliver is described as an emaciated wreck of a man, broken by the war. The dialogue reveals that he was wounded in the neck and that it is painful to straighten his left leg, but he says his ‘head,’ meaning his mind, is the worst. In the 1924 film, his body is contorted, he walks with a cane, and he cannot put his right foot to the ground. In the 1945 film, most of Oliver’s face is scarred, and he has completely lost the use of his right arm and hand. He can walk without aids and there is no visible impairment of his lower body.” (I must say I didn’t notice that his right arm was disabled.) Also in the play Mrs. Minnett is actually a witch, albeit a beneficent one (one would think that just six years after MGM filmed The Wizard of Oz a “good witch” wouldn’t have been an unfamiliar concept to an American movie audience), and there’s a long dream sequence for Laura in the second act in which she dreams that both she and Oliver are good-looking people.

In the dream they’re attended by Mrs. Minnett and at least one other witch, along with three other married couples, three bridesmaids, and assorted cherubs, imps, and children. (In 1920 audiences for the original play had had a problem reconciling the supernatural plot elements with Pinero’s previous reputation as a rom-com writer, just as James M. Barrie is thought of today mainly as the author of Peter Pan even though most of his works were rom-coms, too.) Alas, in this film writers Bodeen (who’d done a much better job balancing realistic and supernatural elements in his script for the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur Cat People three years earlier) and Mankiewicz can’t get the supernatural plot elements to work at all. When we first see Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire in full Hollywood makeup and Herbert Marshall’s character proclaims it a “miracle,” all we can think is, “God must be a really good plastic surgeon.” The Enchanted Cottage is one film from Hollywood’s classic era I’d never seen before, and I’m not sure what to make of it now. Charles said he thought he might like it better on later reflection than he did when we were actually watching it. Curiously, there was an attempt to remake The Enchanted Cottage in 1973 and the would-be producers wanted Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire to be in it, Young in Marshall’s role and McGuire in Natwick’s. Young, who was on record as saying this was the best film he ever made, was eager to do it, but McGuire watched the earlier film and said, essentially, “You can’t go home again.” The Enchanted Cottage wasn’t remade until 2016, with Richard Hatch (not the same one who won the first season of Survivor; this Hatch said, “We forget there are other people with our name, and somehow we feel an ownership with our name. Honestly, this is one of the strangest experiences that's ever happened in my life, and I'm having to deal with it”) and Sarah Navratil in the leads and three credited directors (Joshua Arcadi, Ryan Del Nero, and Andrew Fisher), not a good sign.