Waterloo Bridge: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, May 17, 1940

New York Times, May 17, 1940

'Waterloo Bridge,' With Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor, Opens at the Capitol

By BOSLEY CROWTHEB

Let there be no doubt about it. Vivien Leigh is as fine an actress as we have on the screen today. Maybe even the finest, and that's a lot to say. Plenty of skeptics are still mumbling that her Scarlett O'Hara was a freak, that any one could have played it with such a wide-open field. We know all about them—and we know, too, about the unreconstructed dissidents. So this is an urgent hint that they hike themselves, one and all, right straight to the Capitol Theatre, where "Waterloo Bridge" opened yesterday, and see this remarkable Miss Leigh in her first picture since "Gone With the Wind." If they are not then convinced, we will cover ourself with a sack.

Obviously, Metro has provided Miss Leigh with a story and role which permit her to range, to employ all the grace and mobility which are springed in her frail body and all the expressiveness of her vital face. It is one of those bitter-sweet stories, a poignantly romantic tale of a little ballet dancer who meets a young British army officer on Waterloo Bridge in London during the last World War, falls breathlessly in love with him (and he with her) in a whirlwind wartime courtship, has him torn away from her by the war and then, when she thinks he has been killed, is forced by destitution and despair into the oldest profession. What happens when he returns and finds her thus puts a climax on the story which fairness forbids us to reveal.

True, this is not such a fiction as would qualify for a place among the great. It is an oddly isolated story of two people who rush eagerly into love against the barest background of a world at war and who are held apart mainly by the long arm of coincidence, not by any insuperable barriers. A connection is missed here, a misunderstanding occurs there—and the fate worse than death is the consequence. But Miss Leigh shapes the role of the girl with such superb comprehension, progresses from the innocent, fragile dancer to an empty, bedizened street-walker with such surety of characterization and creates a person of such appealing naturalness that the picture gains considerable substance as a result.

Robert Taylor, too, turns in a surprisingly flexible and mature performance as the young officer, although his activity is mainly confined to being enthusiastic. Other good jobs are done by Virginia Field as a dancer friend, Lucile Watson as an aristocratic matron and C. Aubrey Smith as the inevitable British peer.

Mervyn LeRoy has directed the picture with an emphasis on romantic close-ups, has given it ironic overtone through a tie-up at the beginning and end with the present day in England and has provided one superb sequence—a dance by the two lovers in a candlelit cabaret the night before his departure for the front—which will live in tender memory. In fact, all of "Waterloo Bridge" spans a dream-world of sentiment.

Waterloo Bridge: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, May 17, 1940