Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

It’s very good, not perfect, but very pleasant. However, it’s really too bad about the cut scenes, whose runtime is not all that devastating, and yet it is without them that several jokes are robbed of their point. Above all, the characteristic of the buddy movie as defined by Frances McDormand as Guinevere disappears. In the background of the story is also the interesting tale of the adaptation of the book written by Winifred Watson in 1935, which was originally supposed to be filmed by Universal in the early 1940s, but Pearl Harbor put an end to all such plans. The story goes that Watson sold the rights to her book a total of three times, but sadly died 6 years before an adaptation could be made. Her son thinks she would have liked it very much. The question remains whether it was necessary to move the story to the brink of World War II and at the same time define Miss Pettigrew as a woman from whom one war took something and only the second gave it back. That is a cliché. (12/01/2009)