Trailer
Plot summary
Colonel Roy Cronin, bound for France at the start of the Second World War, steps onto Waterloo Bridge in London and turns a good-luck charm over in his hand. He remembers the First World War, when he is a captain in the Rendleshire Fusiliers and meets Myra Lester on that bridge during an air raid, the two of them taking shelter together. She invites him to that evening's ballet, and he comes, though Madame Olga Kirowa, who runs the troupe, expects her dancers to devote themselves to ballet alone and allows them no personal life. Posted back to the trenches, Roy proposes before he leaves, but the war prevents an immediate marriage, and he tells Myra his family will look after her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Waterloo Bridge (1940)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- From its initial release the 1931 film had been censored in major American cities over objections to its portrayal of prostitution, first by local authorities such as a Chicago police censorship board, and then by the Hays Office, whose enforcement from 1934 made it impossible to exhibit anywhere in the United States.
- Leigh wanted Laurence Olivier for the role of Roy Cronin and was unhappy that Taylor had been cast. She wrote to her husband Leigh Holman: "Robert Taylor is the man in the picture, and as it was written for Larry, it's a typical piece of miscasting. I am afraid it will be a dreary job ..."
- When the film was released in China in November 1940 it was enormously popular, and as a result the story became a standard of Shanghai opera and the song "Auld Lang Syne" became widely known in China.
SPOILER
Because the Motion Picture Production Code had not been in effect when the 1931 version was made, plot details were significantly changed and somewhat sanitized for 1940: in the original Myra is accidentally killed after things are happily resolved, while in the remake she commits suicide.
