Description

A night of heavy snow, and dogs barking outside an old Cotswold farmhouse.... When Nancy and her two sisters went out to see what was the matter, they found a handsome stranger unconscious in a snowdrift. They and their parents saved his life; but when he recovered consciousness, he could not remember anything about himself. He stayed on to get work on a neighboring estate-- and so began a warm and tender love-story.

Notes

A slight but generally innocuous M&B offering from the 50s about an English girl who falls for the handsome amnesiac she finds unconscious in the snow outside her parents' farm. They realize they can't be together while unsure of his marital status...and then his fiancee shows up.

SPOILER ALERT: The other woman is pure plot contrivance -- a gold digger who sees the wealthy hero as her ticket to a comfortable life after her father squandered the family fortune -- but does introduce an interesting variation on the honor code in such stories: the hero feels obligated to marry a woman claiming (without corroboration) to be his fiancee even though he feels nothing for her, but makes it clear that he would have divorced her if he'd found out she'd tricked him into marriage.

• There's one scene with gratuitous racial insensitivity: The heroine's dogs are named Porgy and Bess and there's a discussion of why that's so.

• Also the usual classism: the OM recognized the hero "was part of his own world, and his sympathy for him increased accordingly," etc.

Tags

1950s, American, English, Europe, England, amnesia, f/m, female, romance, third-person

Flags

insensitive racial/ethnic portrayal/stereotyping