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Reappraising Always.

This essay contributes to the study of Steven Spielberg’s cinema by being the first full-length article to examine Always, a neglected but important transitional film in the director’s oeuvre. Apart from directing renewed attention to an overlooked film, the essay contributes to the burgeoning area of film aesthetics by centrally exploring the formal constructive principle of organic unity. Always represents one of the director’s few critical and commercial disappointments. This paper examines the extent to which the film’s failures are attributable to its formal, stylistic, and narrative features. The article offers a defence of Always against specific reproaches. It also advances more positive claims. Following Warren Buckland, the article pinpoints organic unity as Spielberg’s primary compositional principle; it tracks the development of motifs, tactics of foreshadowing, and other internal norms to demonstrate the formation of a structurally unified text; and it posits contrasts with a pertinent antecedent, A Guy Named Joe (Victor Fleming, 1943), so as to set Spielberg’s artistic achievements in relief. The article goes on to isolate some putatively troublesome manoeuvres at the film’s internal level. Some of these problematic aspects, I argue, force us to recognise that important narrative effects can be yielded by modulated deviations from organic unity. The collective aim of these arguments is to suggest that Always is apt for critical re-evaluation. The article also seeks to disclaim two interrelated faults ascribed to Spielberg: a characteristic supplanting of narrative coherence by spectacle and an indifference to subtlety and sophistication. As the first and only sustained study of Always – a mainstream film directed by arguably Hollywood’s foremost commercial filmmaker – the essay is a reference point for Spielberg scholars as well as for humanities scholars examining contemporary American cinema.