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The Years Between (Rank; Universal-International), at its best, deals pretty honestly with a genuine dramatic problem: How are husbands who went to war and wives who stayed at home to resume their marriages, as if there had been no years between? At its worst, the picture wastes energy on a less familiar, less interesting problem: Suppose the husband (Michael Redgrave) has been reported killed, and the wife (Valerie Hobson) is on the point of remarrying when he returns?

One trouble with this kind of fancification of plot is that it blurs the issues--already sufficiently dramatic--which it is supposed to bring into more dramatic focus. When one unnecessary complication leads to another, they become progressively phonier. And for no good enough reason, these nice English people are represented here not merely as a confused couple, but also as squabbling M.P.s.

Luckily, there are several scenes in which the disconsolate pair are allowed to forget this special situation and to act, instead, like any number of other postwar people whose trouble is simply that they have been apart too long, in worlds too different. These scenes are conceived with enough simplicity and insight to give the actors a chance. Whenever they get the chance, they give the show a lot more than it gives them, and The Years Between comes to life as honest domestic drama with persuasive historical overtones. Valerie Hobson is able as well as beautiful, and Michael Redgrave is bitterly effective as the edgy, worn-out hero.

Nora Prentiss (Warner) starts off as a story about a prim, married doctor (Kent Smith) who falls for a nightclub singer (Ann Sheridan) and cannot bear to tell his wife (Rosemary DeCamp). In spite of some dilution and artificiality, the early reels are fairly plausible and appealing--for at least they are about recognizable people in a recognizable predicament. Then artifice takes over.

Rather than ask his wife for a divorce, the doctor fakes his own accidental death in order to live with Singer Nora Prentiss. He fakes it so clumsily that he is accused of his own murder. In still another accident, he gets so badly scarred that his own wife doesn't recognize him. He refuses to defend or identify himself and swears Nora to secrecy.

Ann Sheridan has pleasant vigor in the earlier, comic scenes. Kent Smith, battling against plot circumstance, simulates some believable confusion and sickness of heart. But both players put up a losing fight against the story's unreality.

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