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Unlike previous Acorn Media releases Enemy at the Door or Island at War (contained in the multi-disc set Wartime Britain), it isn’t the arrival of the Germans that’s ruffling British feathers during World War II in We’ll Meet Again but rather the invasion of the Yanks – Americans, that is – who fly into the village of Market Wetherby where they’re stationed at the brand new air base.
It isn’t too long before the American Air Force servicemen begin mixing with the locals including the two beautiful daughters of the owner of the local pub, which incidentally is where they spend most of their time between work on base and raids in the sky, throwing back whatever is on tap to take their mind off of which pilots and gunners didn’t make it back to land that day.
Sudsy romance, wartime intrigue and new complications soon ensue between the villagers and the Americans whom some of the locals have dubbed “overpaid, oversexed, and over here” but for the time being, they’re on the same side… at least that is, until the love of a woman or a misunderstanding creeps into one of thirteen roughly forty-five minute episodes.
While it’s an interesting look at a different aspect of the war considering the culture clash between our countries that for once doesn’t have to involve German occupation, overall, We’ll Meet Again doesn’t possess the same strength as its German-centric TV series Enemy at the Door or the more recent Island at War.
Admittedly and as noted on the box by Acorn, age has not been overly kind to this early 1980s ITV production that was also broadcast on PBS during the same decade. Luckily, nonetheless the plotlines and acting are fascinating enough to keep you invested despite the fact that the main relationship in the series – the affair between a well-to-do married British physician (Susan York) and a dashing Major (Michael J. Shannon) – never quite contained the same sizzle of chemistry that other subplots did such as the love story between a local woman whose romance with an American is interrupted when her gruff, believed-to-be-dead soldier husband returns home very much alive and angry as hell.
Thankfully, where it fails with too much time spent on York and Shannon and repetition of plot – most likely to ensure that new viewers could tune into Again and catch up quickly – it succeeds with a wide range of emotionally riveting characters where intriguingly for a British series, the American soldiers have greater complexity than the British natives depicted onscreen in four slim-packaged DVDs.
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FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.
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