None But the Lonely Heart (1944) on Netflix
Ernie Mott, a drifter, comes home to London, where his mother Ma needs him at her shop. Money is short, and both are tempted to turn to crime.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.4/103,068 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
On Armistice Day, Ernie Mott, a Cockney wanderer with a perfect ear for music, stands at the Unknown Warrior's grave in Westminster Abbey, where his father is remembered, and thinks about the sort of life he wants. His mother Ma wants to know why he has come back and gives him a choice: stay for good or go away for good. He says he will leave in the morning and goes out for a drink, meeting the musician Aggie Hunter by the bar. He prefers the company of Ada Brantline, a gangster's former wife, who refuses a date once she hears he is leaving. The next morning Ma tells the pawnbroker Ike Weber that she has cancer. Ike tells Ernie that his mother needs him, and Ernie stays to help run the shop.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about None But the Lonely Heart (1944)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- To keep Ethel Barrymore available to finish her scenes, RKO paid all the expenses of temporarily closing the Broadway play The Corn Is Green, in which she was then starring.
- At a House Committee on Un-American Activities hearing, Lela Rogers, Ginger Rogers's mother, called the script a "perfect example of the propaganda that Communists like to inject" and accused Clifford Odets of being a Communist.
- Composer Hanns Eisler, an Academy Award nominee for the film's score, was interrogated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and designated an unfriendly witness for refusing to cooperate.
- According to The Hollywood Reporter, the East End London road set was the largest and most complete external set ever built inside a sound stage at that time; it measured 800 feet long and ran the length of two sound stages.
- RKO Pictures head Charles Koerner bought Richard Llewellyn's book as a starring vehicle for Cary Grant and suggested Clifford Odets direct; it became Odets's first feature as director, and he made only one more, The Story on Page One (1959).
- Cary Grant used a Cockney accent in only three films, None but the Lonely Heart, Gunga Din (1939) and Sylvia Scarlett (1935), though Cockney was not his original accent; he was from Bristol.
