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Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Happy Land is a film set firmly in time and place during the World War II era. Had this been attempted during subsequent military involvements the USA has been involved in Happy Land would have been hooted off the screen. As it is Don Ameche, Frances Dee, Harry Carey and the rest are held firmly in check by director Irving Pichel, if they weren't this film would have more tears than the Mississippi.Happy Land is set in small town Midwest USA in Iowa. Ameche and Dee receive that most dreaded of telegrams between 1941 and 1945 from the Navy Department informing them that their son and one and only child Richard Crane has been killed in action in the Pacific. Ameche totally withdraws into himself, not even going to his pharmacy to tend to his business there. It's then that he receives a visit from his long deceased grandfather Harry Carey. It's then he has an It's A Wonderful Life experience only it's a lot more reassuring and it's not his life.Short and sweet Richard Crane had a wonderful life and he died so that others might enjoy freedom. You could never make this message film about any subsequent war.Happy Land's message is why we fight and die in 1943. It's a great fantasy film unlikely to be remade.

I think rating this picture a '4' is about right... it shows a slice of wholesome American life in reprise as Don Ameche reviews the life of his son who has just been killed in WW2. The story starts off with everyone upbeat and happy - then a telegram comes with the bad news. Rusty has been killed in action.Ameche is too immersed in his sorrow to go back to work at the family drugstore; then to his disbelief, his long-dead grandfather reappears from the past to help him work through his memories of Rusty's life, and see how rich and full it was despite being cut so short. At the end of the movie, Harry Morgan arrives; he's a good friend of Rusty's and comes to meet his late friend's parents, and tell them how nobly their son died.It's all nice enough, I guess, a very prim and proper movie showing life in a simpler, more patriotic time. Now... maybe I over-analyze things, but I'm wondering this: if Ameche's grandfather (who is also Rusty's great-grandfather) could appear from the dead, why couldn't Rusty himself have done so? The old man seems as real and 'visible' as anything to Ameche (once he accepts that he's not imagining it all) as the old guy pays him a visit to help him through his grief; he talks about Rusty being 'gone' now, but hey, he's no more gone than you are, old timer! Why didn't you bring him with? I think Henry Morgan's short role in this movie is one of the best I've ever seen him in; he's still very young here, younger than you've probably ever seen him, and his part has some emotion to it which he handles very well. I think in his short part he out-acted everyone else in the whole film. And, I think if we'd have had just one glimpse at the very end of Rusty appearing before his dad to say 'Don't be sad, pop, I'm okay where I am....' it would have made the earlier part with the old guy a lot more credible and it would have given a good feeling to the ending of the story, reminding people that maybe this isn't all there is to our existence.It's a nice movie, flawed in that major regard for me - just that one change of having Rusty make one appearance from 'beyond' would have turned the whole thing around for me. So, I'll give it a four as an artifact of the days of WW2 and an earlier version of America now gone. And I might add, it's an America in which I wish I could have lived.

Don Ameche's son is killed in WW II. Can grandpa Harry Carey, returning from the dead, convince a grieving Ameche that his life, his son's life, and this whole war is worth his son's sacrifice, and get Ameche to believe his small town is indeed HAPPY LAND?Despite a wonderful opening sequence, reminiscent of the homespun melancholy of the better parts of Our Town and Since You Went Away, this is a rather superficial and bland treatment of the grief of a good, if temporarily embittered man, whose son has died in the war. Ameche, a decent enough actor, does not have skill to bring off his role, and Harry Carey, with his mono-tonal voice, and facial expressions running the gamut of emotions from A to B, makes conversations about life and death as enchanting as a conversation about whether to pick up milk at the store. The result might be truly Midwestern in its emotions, but it's questionable whether that's a good thing.Much of the movie is flashbacks to the life of Ameche's child (though, interestingly, we do not see the kid actually fighting in the war). There's nothing especially interesting in the flashbacks, nor, really, is there much there that would provide comfort to Ameche. A final scene, where Ameche learns from a young Harry Morgan how his son died heroically, works somewhat better, simply because Morgan's flat Midwestern delivery and Ameche's flat Midwestern delivery grounds what has been rather leaden supernatural stuff in a bit of reality. Whether Ameche, under these circumstances, would find the will to go on again after all this, is questionable.A comparison between this film and It's A Wonderful Life is inevitable, as they deal with the same basic situation. This film, far more low key and far less extreme than the Stuart/Capra collaboration, might be more appealing to folks who prefer their fantastic/supernatural cinema to be realistic. But to this viewer, the far more dramatic events and emotional acting of Stuart makes his movie more fun to watch and, oddly enough, more believable.Assessment -- Don't avoid this movie. You might like it. Alas, I did not.

Finding this oddity on cable recently, I was quickly seduced by its opening sequence, a Welles-like plunge down main street into a small everytown's heart, Marsh's pharmacy. Here, as some clever camera work reveals, solid citizen Lew Marsh (Don Ameche) tends to the blisses of early 40's Hollywood America; everyone's prescription is filled, sundaes topped off with a cherry, local oddballs humored, etc.What most recommends the film is its frame narrative. Quickly the idyll is broken when Marsh learns his son has been killed in the war. He sinks into a lengthy depression. Enter the ghost of Gramp to conduct psychotherapy: he spirits Marsh back into the past where we relive the childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood of the now-dead Rusty. While the mid-section unfolds linearly, Marsh and Gramp function offscreen as a Greek chorus (their melancholy dialogue often a grim counterpoint to the generally cheerful scenes). Then it's back to the present where an exorcized Marsh learns to stop questioning the wisdom of sacrificing young men in war. "Rusty died a good death," Gramp's ghost counsels, and we know it's only a matter of time before Marsh will agree.Three years before "It's A Wonderful Life" (1946), "Happy Land" was already hijacking the "Christmas Carol" device of reliving the past on a therapeutic sightseeing tour. Unlike the Stewart film, though, the tone is more darkly somber, lingeringly mournful. The theme of sorrow outweighs the theme of recovery. Ameche looks and sounds wracked, bitter.In fact, the film's heart is scarcely in its chief enterprise, which is to steel its audience for more wartime sacrifice. It seems at times almost to be working against its own message that war deaths are "good deaths." I imagine it may have helped salve some broken hearts, but the crime of this type of film is that, if it succeeds, it only helps to break more.