Green Dolphin Street

This wildly popular adaptation of Elizabeth Goudge’s 1944 historical novel was MGM's most successful movie of the year, earning over $9 million in 1947 and becoming the most popular movie at the British box office the following year, but because of its high cost only recorded a profit of $339,000. The all-star cast is headed up by Lana Turner (hot off her femme fatale role in the iconic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice) and Donna Reed (hot off of her iconic turn in It's a Wonderful Life) as two upper-class sisters from the town of San Pierre on the English Channel Island of Guernsey, who fall in love with the same man. The guy in question William Ozanne (Richard Hart) is below their station but the shrewd and determined Marianne (Turner) thinks she can make him into a gentleman. He, however, is sweet on the more simple and modest Marguerite (Reed). To complicate matters, there's another lower-class fella interested in Marianne, Timothy Haslam played by the rugged Van Heflin. Through a series of miscalculations, bad turns, and the scheming of Marianna, most of these characters end up in New Zealand around the time of its colonization. 

The 142-minute picture is a pretty soapy affair with more over-the-top moments of hockey melodrama than scenes that really shine, but there are many sequences that really draw you in. The excellent supporting cast includes Frank Morgan, Dame May Whitty, Edmund Gwenn, and Reginald Owen. The locations and special effects are simply marvellous (the picture won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and was also nominated for Cinematography (Black-and-White), Film Editing, and Sound Recording). While hardly one of the great historical melodramas of Hollywood's Golden Age, the picture is still quite watchable.