WAIT TILL THE SUN SHINES, NELLIE (Henry King, 1952)

Nostalgic, poignant, all-aglow, Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie covers a near half-century of a stubborn man’s life. Ben Halpen has just married Nellie, who believes, from what Ben has told her, that their train is headed to Chicago, where Nellie wants to live. It isn’t. The couple gets off short of Chicago, in a small Illinois town called Sevillinois, where the barber shop that Ben has bought awaits their new life. (Get it? The Barber of Sevillinois.) Ben assures Nellie that the place is rented; their “honeymoon” consists of one night in their new home.
     Through the years, stuff happens: babies are born; Ben goes off to one war, his son, Benny, goes off to another; two of the main characters get killed, one of them in a train explosion, the other in mobster gunfire that shatters the glass front of Ben’s establishment. Almost everything bad can be traced to some lie that Ben has told, some treacherous act he has committed.
     Those who either credit or discredit the film with a sentimentalizing of small-town life miss the point—especially given the absence of sentimentality in Henry King’s crisp, objective direction. (Its attitude is “This happened, and then this . . . .”) Excepting 12 O’Clock High (1949), this is King’s best film.
     Working from Allan Scott’s script, which Maxwell Shane helped adapt from Ferdinand Reyher’s novel I Hear Them Sing, King pursues a canvas of unfolding historical events, including the Spanish-American War and Prohibition, in which errant points in an individual’s life intersect, generating disastrous results to his responsibility for which he remains oblivious. It is King’s ironical metaphor for his current America.
     The singing, the dancing all delight; and Leon Shamroy contributes the deepest, most haunting color cinematography of his Oscar-studded career.