Paging Evie Jackson: ‘Dear Heart’ Reviewed

For a guy who’s engaged, Harry (Glenn Ford) spends a lot of Delbert Mann’s Dear Heart flirting with other women (and it doesn’t always stop at flirting), but that’s the weird moral line this movie walks. Apparently affairs are okay as long as Harry’s the one doing the cheating.

As much as the trailer emphasizes Harry and his complicated love life (a mess of his own making, so not remotely sympathetic), Dear Heart is more of a split between his character and Geraldine Page‘s Evie Jackson. Harry and Evie are staying at the same hotel. Harry’s there to iron out his promotion ahead of his impending nuptials. Evie is there to attend a postmaster’s convention. They first cross paths when Evie notices him at the train station — Harry looks right past her — but they don’t actually share a conversation until they run out of tables at the hotel restaurant and decide to seat the two solo diners together.

What’s really cool about this movie is how it uses the confined space of the hotel to have Evie and Harry keep bumping into the same people (including both Mrs Kravitzes, for any Bewitched fans out there). It’s also a film that does an excellent job of establishing the layout of the hotel, so you know where characters are or can place them within the space. It all adds to the realism of the sudden but temporary familiarity that develops between strangers over the course of a weekend. Whereas in some films the staff are part of the scenery — you’re not encouraged to notice them at all — here you start to recognize the faces, which gives the actors in these usually bit roles time to establish personalities, like Steve Bell as Chester the elevator operator or a particularly funny Barbara Nichols as the young woman working the card stand.

It’s Evie, with all of her foibles and quirks, that makes the biggest impression. A combination of good writing by Tad Mosel and specificity in Page’s performance, she’s both completely recognizable as someone you would come across on vacation and completely herself. Evie is a lot — harmless, but nobody has the time or patience to put up with her chatter. The kind of person who is easier to ignore than to engage in brief conversation; everybody knows her, and yet she’s alone. What rocks is that Evie knows how to entertain herself. She’s not too embarrassed to pay a page to call her name in the hotel lobby — the point being not to answer him but to hear her name being called over and over again. She doesn’t care if people would think it’s weird that she brings her own light bulb to the hotel room because she doesn’t like the wattage they use. Evie pays for being “weird” but she shines because she doesn’t let that stop her (if she could change anything about herself, if she tried). Evie is Evie, and it’s worth putting up with Harry to get to the scenes with her.

Dear Heart is the kind of movie you don’t see enough of anymore outside of the indie scene — a film about following two people over a weekend and seeing what happens. It’s imperfect but worth seeking out for its colorful, human characters.

As a PSA to Angela Lansbury fans: despite the prominence of her name on the poster — you almost see her name before Ford’s or Page’s — this is not an Angela Lansbury movie. That marketing is a complete lie, and while Lansbury does create a full-fledged character in the few scenes she has towards the end, you will forget she’s meant to be showing up because of how long it takes for her to appear.

Dear Heart is on sale now from Warner Archive and can be purchased from Movie Zyng.

Warner Archive provided me with a free copy of the Blu-Ray I reviewed in this article. The opinions I share are my own.