ARTIFACT AND FICTION. PBS ran the old WWII weeper Since You Went Away tonight. It's a very sweet megaproduction in the old style. I note with interest that David O. Sleznick has a writing credit. His official screen bibliography is limited, but we know that even without a byline he had strong ideas about what went into the films he produced. Hitchcock told Truffaut that the Selznick wanted to punctuate the burning of Manderley in Rebecca with a large, smokey "R" floating above the ruins. (Hitchcock sensibly refused.)

Anyway the pic is a honey. Claudette Colbert's husband goes off to war, is reported missing in action, and CC must guide their budding daughters through heartbreak and mild domestic comedy. The acting is terrific in that big Forties manner that is incomprehensible, I know, to non-fans. (Bogart translates well across the ages because of the cold sweat of existential dread clinging to all his performances, but to youngsters raised on today's far less effusive players, most antique movie stars might as well be the wolf that does "To Be Or Not To Be" and gets hit with tomatoes in that old Warner Brothers cartoon.) The girls alternate between noble restraint and bouts of hysteria that are still raw and disturbing even on TV -- on the big screen they must have really bludgeoned open the lachrymal floodgates. Robert Walker is a doomed young soldier -- funny how the stink of death clung to Walker, even when he was very young and squeaky-voiced and well before he drank himself to death. Old family friends Joseph Cotten and Monty Woolley stop by from time to time to cut the estrogen miasma. Toward the end Cotten even makes some wise-ass professions of love to Colbert that are forcibly steered clear of any discomforting suggestion that either may be seriously considering a romance should the old man's death be confirmed (Cotten is especially good at this -- I searched his eyes during this scene, and he allowed not one flicker of subtext to escape from them).

I must add that at one point Monty Woolley quotes Wordsworth, aptly and without attribution -- not because Selznick wanted people to think he wrote it, I'm sure, but because it was part of the cultural life of the time and if you didn't get it, you should really make a better effort to keep up. Who would do that today? Why not?

John Cromwell does a nice company-man job of directing -- he manages some bravura touches, usually involving a key character with her back turned to the camera -- and generally keeps the train on track. But even to those of us predisposed to give ourselves over to the sentiments, it's hard not to be aware of the salesmanship involved. Despite the core truth of the thing -- that war is hell on the loved ones at home, and the only useful response is faith in the glorious resolution -- we know that despair and discontent are not absent, but merely fended off. A few years later, when all the living were returned to their homes, The Best Years of Our Lives would blow the whistle. Of course that, too, was a stalwart Hollywood product, but I wonder if Dana Andrews sitting in that disused cockpit didn't have as much to do with America's rude, postwar awakening from idealism as Brando on his motorcycle.

On one level, maybe the primary one, Since You Went Away is uplift, and hence propaganda, however kindly meant. Still I enjoyed it, was moved by it, and not only because the war in question was the last one to which I can give unqualified support. Don't tell anyone (I mean, who reads this, anyway) but every sneering and cynical impulse I have toward the manipulation of patriotism is shadowed by affection for the genuine article to which it refers, and the noble feelings it stirs, however shabby the pretenses. The fellow-feeling of American citizens, to the extent that it still exists, is beautiful and very human -- I wish it were still our birthright, and not a privilege granted upon favorable consideration of loyalty test results. Once upon a time it was possible even for artists to share in it, without having to announce or even have reservations and qualifications. I love "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and Young Mr. Lincoln and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. When George Bush lands on an aircraft carrier and talks about America, however, I want to throw up.

I came away from tonight's artifact of the old America grateful that even its memory exists, because to remember it is to hold hope, however tenuously, that it may again be realized. But, in the immortal words of Johnny Thunders, you can't put your arms around a memory.