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Peter Ibbetson

1935

Love... born in the simple hearts of children... loving gloriously... triumphant through the years!

When his mother dies, young Peter Ibbetson leaves Paris and his best friend, Mary, behind to live with a severe uncle in England. Years later, Peter is an architect with little time for women, until he begins a project with the Duke and Duchess of Towers. When Peter and the duchess become great friends, she reveals that she is Mary — but the duke soon suspects his wife of infidelity and challenges Peter to a duel, threatening the pair's second chance.

Gary Cooper Ann Harding John Halliday Ida Lupino Douglass Dumbrille Virginia Weidler Dickie Moore Doris Lloyd Gilbert Emery Donald Meek Christian Rub Elsa Buchanan Jack Adair Robert Adair Stanley Andrews Martha Bamattre Ambrose Barker Theresa Maxwell Conover Marcelle Corday Harry Cording Blanche Craig Adrienne D'Ambricourt Leonid Kinskey Cyril McLaglen Clive Morgan Marguerite Namara Martha O'Driscoll Gerald Rogers Colin Tapley

Alternative Titles

Amor Sem Fim, Sogno di prigioniero, Sueño de amor eterno, Питер Иббетсон, 彼得·艾伯特逊, O Sonho Eterno, 피터 이벳슨, Somni d'amor etern

Genres

Romance Fantasy Drama

Themes

Moving relationship stories Captivating relationships and charming romance Passion and romance Touching and sentimental family stories Surreal and thought-provoking visions of life and death Charming romances and delightful chemistry Show All…

Premiere

31 Oct 1935

USANR

Theatrical

07 Nov 1935

04 Feb 1936

FranceU

15 May 1936

Germany

TV

24 Oct 1980

Germany

France

04 Feb 1936

TheatricalU

Germany

15 May 1936

Theatrical

24 Oct 1980

USA

31 Oct 1935

PremiereNR

07 Nov 1935

Theatrical

88 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★★★ 2

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

"The desperate love between children, is there anything forgotten so soon?"
Peter (Gary Cooper) and Mary (Ann Harding) fall in love as children before Peter is forced to move away from Paris to England following the death of his mother. He never forgets her and that love never dies within him until the two are reunited years later, only to be separated again.
The structure really works here. We get to see their relationship in three almost equally divided sections. The first act mostly shows their bond as kids. The second the reunion as adults who don't realize who they were to one another in the past. The third covering the longing and yearning of the second separation.
The first…
Review by reibureibu

An Old Hollywood film where its characters can dream themselves into each others' consciousness, Peter Ibbetson becomes quite the unusual love story that does the rare thing of messing with metaphysics back then in a way this pronounced.
Essentially boy meets girl becomes childhood soul mates, separated by space and time until they meet once more in their future. But alas, they cannot be together for she is betrothed and in the heat of the moment violence separates them once more (this time forever).
As life rips lovers apart just as it joins them together again, it offers them a condolence: their love so strong it creates magical, shared dream space where they can be together finally, free from the…
Review by theironcupcake ★★★★½ 4

"You needn't be afraid, Peter. The strangest things are true and the truest things are strange."
What is love, if not a shared dream?
As exquisitely European as it gets for Hollywood in the 1930s. Just the other day I was praising Charles Lang’s black-and-white cinematography in Female on the Beach, and now here I am confronted with it again, as strikingly luminous as anything photographed by Gregg Toland during the same era or, across the pond, by Henri Alekan in La Belle et la Bête. While I can’t claim to have read the original George du Maurier novel – a disappointment to my mother, no doubt, who wrote a paper on his works for her senior thesis as a…
Review by ele 🪷 ★★½

gary cooper, tall and handsome as ever, in 19th century garb complete with a pencil mustache: hello
me, completely caught off guard: turns out the lord hath decideth to bless me on this day
Review by irmavep ★★★★½

I first heard of (and wanted to see) this film almost 10 years ago but for one reason and another I never got around to it. I finally watched it last night and it really is the film I've been imagining for a decade, and more. At the same time I'm glad I waited, because there are many things about it that wouldn't have meant as much to me then as they do now.
Beyond everything else that this gorgeous erotic material/immaterial melodrama is, I think it is also about film. We dream the same dream. Talismans and scraps haunt us like people.
Review by Paul Elliott ★★★½

Directed by Henry Hathaway, who became predominately connected with helming Westerns, Peter Ibbetson features a progressing metaphysical storyline which gives rise to some impressive and seamless shifts between the world of reality and the territory of dreams.
Set during the Victorian-era and founded on a novel by George du Maurier, the tale locates and keeps possession of a passionate intensity together with some poetic qualities for the duration of its runtime. Gary Cooper's portrayal of the titular character provides him with a low-key mournfulness, and his livelihood as an architect finds him tasked by a peer of the realm to construct stables on his north England property. A predicament emerges after he falls in love with the wife of the…
Review by Anna Imhof 🌸 ★★★★ 2

"Who is to say what is real and what isn't real?"
Orphan boy in mourning, a girl in a white dress sitting in a tree—the lush gardens of childhood. Smiles of truth. Separation, losing each other's hands, life in all its ugliness—the cruelty of time.
Fate: Finding each other again, psychic connections, the power of the imagination that saves us from reality. Death trembling in the corner. A celebration of the memory and all that is pure.
100% my kind of corn.
Review by noir1946 ★★★★

“I’m not going to lose you again, ever.”
This is the sort of romantic whimsy that shouldn’t work, but it does. Peter (Gary Cooper) and Mimsy (Ann Harding) fall in love as children in nineteenth-century Paris, are separated, and come together by chance many years later, unaware of their identities until they realize they can communicate through their dreams. When they become permanently separated, they continue their romance in their dreams. Hokey? Yes, but not as hokey as it might have been because of the professionalism of the filmmakers.
“The strangest things are true, and the truest things are strange.”
Peter Ibbetson is an aberration in the long career of Henry Hathaway, who never directed another film like it. A…
Review by Patrick Preziosi ★★★★★

Begins as one of the greatest distilled portraits of a resoundingly lonely and domineered childhood, then it’s an architect facilitated love-triangle par excellence (a million times better than that later Cooper vehicle, The Fountainhead), and then it’s an expressionist fantasy, functioning with its own secular spiritualism, as this is an experience shared between the two lovers only, not adhering to any religion, or making any pledges of divinity. It’s so brilliantly earthbound in its first two acts—with the indispensable aid of a cockney Ida Lupino—that it plays like a true experience of transcendence, the bittersweetness of leaving a flesh and blood world behind never attenuating itself. Pair it with The Ghost and Mrs. Muir for a double bill that’ll make you believe in anything. My heart stopped when Ann Harding walked through the prison bars.
Review by Nolio ★★★

So uhh, its a romance flick from the 30s. What I expected was some melodramatic dialogue, cheesy proclamations of love from the prime couple and some problems along the way. What I wasn't expecting was for these two lovers to be connected through their dreams.. and basically their souls. They're literally soulmates.
This made for some interesting story elements near the 3rd act, and I couldn't quite get on board with it, especially for how damn depressing the film got. I mean, depressing is good in a certain context but this is just a very sad story about two people not falling in love and I don't really get the point of it. The surreal elements are interesting, but its…
Review by Wesley Stenzel ★★★½

The first 60 percent of this movie is essentially a standard (but well-shot) romantic melodrama. Then it morphs into something more fantastical and emotional, which is infinitely more memorable and moving than the preceding story, and the movie is worth checking out on the strength of the third act alone. The acting proves to be the film’s biggest failure, as it provides some of the worst accent work I’ve ever seen — the characters are supposed to be British and French, but almost everybody sounds like an American.
Review by Richmond_Hill ★★★★

A curious phantasia made more so by being structured like a symphony: an allegro of an Arcadian childhood; slower second movement covert-courtship; a minuet of melodramatic prison violence leading into the molto-fantastical finale of trespassed dreams (Symphonie Fantastique perhaps, except Berlioz already bagged that title - and his was in five movements).
That 19th Century programmed romanticism is the key to this fractured but gauzily lyrical work that falls between the High Victoriana of Author, George du Maurier (of Triby fame - more mind games) and the 1930s cinematic fondness for the visually poetic.
This film doesn't come close to Jeans' Vigo or Cocteau in their anchored ethereality, but it does alluringly skim the scenic surface if only for the…

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Peter Ibbetson

Synopsis

Love... born in the simple hearts of children... loving gloriously... triumphant through the years!

Cast

Director Director

Producer Producer

Writers Writers

Original Writers Original Writers

Editor Editor

Cinematography Cinematography

Additional Directing Add. Directing

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Art Direction Art Direction

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Composers Composers

Sound Sound

Studio

Country

Primary Language

Spoken Languages

Alternative Titles

Genres

Themes

Premiere

31 Oct 1935

Theatrical

07 Nov 1935

04 Feb 1936

15 May 1936

TV

24 Oct 1980

France

04 Feb 1936

Germany

15 May 1936

24 Oct 1980

USA

31 Oct 1935

07 Nov 1935

Popular reviews

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Director

Producer

Writers

Original Writers

Editor

Cinematography

Additional Directing

Executive Producer

Art Direction

Visual Effects

Composers

Sound