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Mrs. Parkington Movie Review

Mrs. Parkington is a 1944 drama film directed by Tay Garnett and starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. It is a very forgettable movie.

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“Why did you marry me?

Life was too simple without you“

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Mrs. Parkington marries a miner who strikes gold. She tries to fit into the wealthy New York lifestyle and guides us, through flashbacks, about the rising and falling of the Parkington family fortune. This is one of the many pictures starring Garson and Pidgeon as a married couple released in the forties. The public apparently yearned for these two to star together and they were truly wonderful, but the material that they were given often wasn’t worthy of their talent.

Case in point – Mrs. Parkington. This film has such a tiresome, forgettable storyline that we’ve seen countless times in this decade alone, but it doesn’t have anything new or fresh to distinguish itself from countless other similar tales. It is told in the flashback style, but even though I sometimes love this approach, this time around the structure more resembled a soap opera filler than a cinematic tour de force.

We see the Parkington family throughout decades as they went from fame to financial struggles and so on and so forth. None of the plot points were interesting in any shape or form and this material is suitable for the literary form, certainly not for a visual medium such as film. The result is a very long, boring viewing experience.

Agnes Moorehead was nominated for her supporting role here and she was fine. Greer Garson was nominated for Best Actress and she really is the best thing about this movie as her performance is expectedly terrific and frequently even powerful, though the role was anything but great. Walter Pidgeon is very good himself, but his character was often times too unlikable.

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They share a solid relationship in Mrs. Parkington, but the movie isn’t as romantic as one would hope. It is more dramatic in tone, but this drama wasn’t meaningful nor was it ever all that intriguing. The dialogue is okay, but even in that area the film did not impress me. There were some solid moments where the cast in particular excelled, but the strong material simply wasn’t there to support them.