HANOVER STREET (1979) **1/2 I believe that people are made for each other and I believe that sometimes when they meet one of them is already married to someone else. This is about that. It's about that against a backdrop of World War II. I was born 17 years after that war ended, but it was powerful enough that there was still a strong whiff of it in the air, especially in Germany where I grew up. I know that there's this strange (to everyone else) and incredible sense of camaraderie when soldiers who served together in battle get together after those years between, and I've seen it happen enough to know that there's something even more elevated about it when those soldiers served together during WWII. When you put a bunch of guys from anywhere anywhere else, they go after the local girls. Hence there's a lingering sense of ambivalence from the British saved from Hitler by Americans. I know all that. It's a very powerful mix, but the true understanding of it can't pass from the participants, only shadows. Which means that there are a lot less people around with a sense of how authentic any of this is, than when it came out. I doubt that anyone's ever felt dumb about putting Harrison Ford or Christopher Plummer in their movie, and it's enough to say that Lesley-Anne Down is absolutely believable as the love interest of two generations of sex symbols. It's a very heady mix I did say, one that couldn't help having dramatic overtones. Unfortunately the writers appear, to me, to confuse soap opera for drama about half way through, and once having crossed that line they just start basting with broader strokes rather than trying to right the ship. It's a good film, but it leaves you with a sense that it could have been so much more.
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