Waterloo Bridge (1940) is one of the essential Vivien Leigh movies — and is an Old Hollywood melodrama whose concentrated heartbreak might have some viewers feeling that it’s a more devastating romance than Gone with the Wind (1939) could ever be.
Released in 1940 by MGM, Waterloo Bridge places Leigh opposite popular MGM actor Robert Taylor. The duo falls in love in a doomed World War I romance directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Though the film is much smaller than Gone with the Wind — it isn’t anywhere near the grand epic that Leigh’s former film is — it’s the more emotional of the two films. The heartbreak is more severe, and it’s hard to forget once the film ends.
Spoilers follow for the entire plot of Waterloo Bridge.
The romantic drama opens during World War II, when Roy Cronin (Taylor), an older British officer, decides to pause on London’s Waterloo Bridge before he returns to his military duty. He pulls a small good luck charm out of his pocket and, through a long flashback that then takes up the rest of the picture, we learn about the young woman who gave him this charm.
Her memory has forever stayed with him, and it’s clear that, now that he’s in his older age, her memory will never release him. Roy has survived the First World War… but where is Myra, the woman who gave him this charm?
A Tragic Love Story in a Time of War
The romance of Waterloo Bridge begins during a potentially tragic situation: a World War I air raid. Roy, then a young captain, meets Myra Lester (Leigh), a young ballerina who is hurrying toward a shelter with other young ladies who are part of her ballet company.
However, when she drops her purse, he helps her, and the pair end up taking cover in the shelter together. Their attraction to each other is almost instantaneous, but thanks to all the danger they’re in during wartime, the speed of their attraction isn’t too unbelievable.
Roy and Myra fall in love in a rather urgent way, thanks to the war and Roy’s potential departure to France. After their brief first meeting where they don’t even exchange names, Roy attends Myra’s ballet. Myra, intrigued, defies the severe Madame Olga Kirowa to see him again.
During their first real evening together, they head to the Candlelight Club and dance to “Auld Lang Syne” while members of the orchestra extinguish their candles one by one as they finish their parts. This memorable scene remains the film’s most famous romantic sequence, as the couple is gradually left in darkness. It’s a mix of sentimentality and romance, paired with the dark future that is in store for the young couple.
The First Cruel Twist
Rather quickly, Roy proposes marriage to Myra. However, the war prevents the ceremony from taking place. Roy is ordered back to the front before he can officially tie the knot with Myra, leaving her behind with promises of protection from his aristocratic family.
Unfortunately, this is when Myra’s life begins to fall apart. Because she defied Madame Kirowa to go see Roy again, because she placed love ahead of her professional career as a ballerina, she is dismissed from the ballet company. Kitty, Myra’s loyal and more world-weary friend, is fired too when she defends Kitty to Madame Kirowa.
Suddenly, both women have lost their income and the security that the ballet company gave them during a brutal time of war. From this point forward, Waterloo Bridge becomes less of a grand love story — and more about how quickly respectability can collapse.
No matter how hard they try, Myra and Kitty cannot find work. Hunger soon follows once all of their saved money has evaporated. Though this is a polished MGM film, the movie doesn’t completely shy away from what kind of future the women have. However, possibly because it’s an MGM film made in the 1940s, this type of future Kitty and Myra face is represented in a very subtle way, rather than overtly.
Now that Myra and Kitty have no employment or family protection, let alone social standing, they are just two young women in wartime London with misfortune at their front door. It’s not necessarily like Myra makes a “wrong” choice; she merely has no safe choice to choose from.
A Devastating Misunderstanding
One of the most devastating moments — and misunderstandings — occurs in a posh tearoom as Myra waits to meet Roy’s mother, Lady Margaret. However, as she waits for the older lady to appear, Myra reads a newspaper… and learns that Roy’s name has been listed among the dead.
Stunned and unable to explain the tragic news once Lady Margaret appears, Myra behaves so erratically that Roy’s mother leaves with a rather terrible impression of her. While we, the audience, understand Myra’s shock and her actions, Lady Margaret sees confusion and impropriety. A relationship that could have resulted in Lady Margaret supporting and saving Myra and Kitty has become damaged before it can even begin.
In this way, Myra doesn’t just lose Roy. She has also lost the future that made all of her recent hardship bearable. After she becomes seriously ill with grief and heartbreak, Kitty takes over and does the only thing she can to bring money into their little household: she becomes a prostitute.
Eventually, once Myra is better and discovers what her friend has done for her, she feels she has no choice but to follow down the same path.
The Production Code was in full swing in 1940, so MGM couldn’t treat prostitution as explicitly as they were able to in Waterloo Bridge’s 1931 pre-code version. Regardless, audiences still understand what, exactly, is going on — and how poverty and despair during wartime have pushed two young women to become sex workers.
Roy Returns From the Dead
As Myra falls into destitution and prostutition, Roy suddenly comes back from the dead. It’s a year since her fall, and Myra is at Waterloo Station, looking for soldiers coming home as new potential customers. And then, there Roy is, among all the returning soldiers.
After their happy reunion, Roy explains that he had been wounded and held as a prisoner of war; the report of his death was a case of mistaken identity. He assumes Myra has come to meet him there and wonders how she learned he was coming home.
For Roy, this reunion is akin to a miracle. For Myra, it is a mixture of pure happiness and intense tragedy. She isn’t the woman he once loved. She’s had to change to survive. Will he understand?
Roy still loves Myra, clearly. This isn’t a movie about lost love, where the hero returns with another woman on his arm, an engagement to someone else, or unwilling to marry the young woman he gave promises to. Roy is not the one who will tear their romance apart; it’s Myra.
Myra feels convinced that all that she did to survive has made her completely unfit for the life that Roy offers her through his love and protection. For a moment, Myra begins to believe she will finally get all that she has wanted… but then, she feels unable to accept it.
Roy’s faith in Myra is sincere, but it is also incredibly innocent. After their reunion, he decides to take her to his family’s Scottish estate. Myra is also reunited with Lady Margaret — who seems very willing to put aside their first tragic meeting — and Myra begins to live her dream life.
Myra Ruins Her Own Life…
Slowly, Myra’s guilt eats at her. Everyone is accepting of her, including Lady Margaret and Roy’s uncle, even though some of Roy’s society friends snicker behind her back because she was a dancer. If only they knew the truth…
Towards the end of the film, Myra has come to realize she cannot marry Roy, as she’s worried what she has done will destroy his name and his happiness. In a remarkable moment, she confesses what she has had to do to live to Lady Margaret — and Lady Margaret responds with compassion, rather than disgust. She urges Myra not to make an immediate decision. Instead, she wants Myra to talk to Roy.
But Myra cannot. She cannot bear to tell him the truth. Roy only learns after Myra leaves, saying she cannot marry him, and subsequently goes missing. In his search for the woman he loves, Roy seeks out Kitty, and it is Myra’s friend who tells him the truth during their search for Myra.
Nobody judges Myra for what she has done. It is Myra herself who judges her actions in the end — and she becomes her own judge, jury, and executioner.
Vivien Leigh Is Devastating in Waterloo Bridge
Vivien Leigh’s performance is one of the main reasons why Waterloo Bridge is so memorable — and so heartbreaking. Whereas Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara was a character built on defiance, appetite, and survival, Waterloo Bridge’s Myra Lester seems to retreat from the world… before the world finally destroys her.
At the beginning of the film, Leigh plays Myra as almost weightless, though she is a bit of a defeatist, as Roy points out. It’s like she’s surprised to discover that her life might indeed contain joy — and even a grand love.
But once Myra learns of Roy’s supposed death, that lightness completely disappears from both her face and her posture. It’s not just that Myra is sad. It’s as if she has become a completely different person.
Interestingly, Leigh doesn’t play Myra as morally weak or foolish. The choices she is forced to make come from love, grief, and a more restrictive period. Even when Myra believes that she is a ruined woman, Leigh plays her as unruined beneath all of her shame — and she allows the audience to see that easily and, therefore, sympathize with her.
This is not a film about a “fallen woman” who receives punishment because she became a prostitute. No, Waterloo Bridge is instead a tragic love story in which a woman herself cannot imagine that what she did to survive deserves forgiveness.
Leigh’s marvelous work in this film is even more remarkable when you remember that it was her first screen performance since her triumph in 1939’s Gone with the Wind. Unsurprisingly, MGM advertised Waterloo Bridge around Leigh, who was newly one of the world’s most celebrated stars. She even received top billing over Robert Taylor!
The Ending Remains Heartbreaking
After leaving Roy, Myra returns alone to Waterloo Bridge, the place where Roy first entered her life. Though Roy searches for her, he is too late to save her. As military vehicles drive over the bridge, Myra steps into the path of an oncoming truck. The moment is quick. Roy and Myra are not given any confession or farewell.
The ending of Waterloo Bridge remains heartbreaking because the audience — both then and now — knows that Myra is wrong about her only possible future. Lady Margaret didn’t condemn her immediately when she learned the truth. She might have been able to help Myra. Meanwhile, there is no indication that Roy wouldn’t have understood — and forgiven her or assuaged her guilt. Kitty loves her and always tried to protect her.
The people closest to Myra were prepared to recognize the desperate straits she was in. They were willing to give her the mercy and understanding she didn’t seem able to give herself.
In a much lesser melodrama, Roy and Myra would have been separated by a villain or some accident. Instead, in Waterloo Bridge, they are separated by shame that Myra refused to make irreversible.
At the very end, the film returns to the older Roy in the midst of the Second World War. He’s still standing on the bridge with the good luck charm that will forever connect him to Myra. Roy may go on to keep living. However, the final framing of him makes it clear that he has never quite escaped the loss of Myra.
Is Waterloo Bridge Sadder Than Gone with the Wind?
Gone With the Wind contains death, war, hunger, marital collapse, and the destruction of an entire social order. Scarlett loses her parents, her friends, a child, just about every illusion she has ever had. Finally, at the close of the epic, she even loses Rhett Butler (Clark Gable).
However, the film’s famous ending brings some level of hope back into Scarlett’s life. There is still tomorrow — and Scarlett is searching for that better life as the picture ends.
Waterloo Bridge offers no comparable promise or even a hint of a happy ending. Myra does not survive to see another brighter day. She will never seek to rebuild her life, reinvent herself, or challenge the social order that condemns her. She will never wed Roy. Roy cannot save her in time — and the closing scene hints that time does not heal him.
Gone With the Wind is a grand tragedy that is shaped around the survival of one woman. Meanwhile, Waterloo Bridge is an intimate tragedy shaped around the loss of belief in survival. That vital difference is why many — including us — feel that Waterloo Bridge is much more heartbreaking than Gone With the Wind could ever be. For those who enjoy Old Hollywood melodrama, this intimate tragedy of Waterloo Bridge is also its greatest strength.
A Remake That Is Now a Classic
The 1940s version of Waterloo Bridge is not the first film version of this now iconic story. The story originated from Robert E. Sherwood’s 1930 play, which then inspired 1931’s Waterloo Bridge, starring Mae Clarke. MGM later revisited the story in 1956 with Gaby, starring Leslie Caron and John Kerr.
Each film version is interesting in its own right. Each also reflects the censorship rules that ruled during its day. Finally, each also reflects the romantic conventions that were popular in each era. Out of all three adaptations, however, LeRoy’s 1940 version remains the most watchable. It’s a real studio-era tearjerker — and we mean that in the best way possible.
Among Leigh movies, Waterloo Bridge (1940) deserves to stand beside Gone with the Wind as one of her grandest achievements. Sure, this film has no burning Atlanta, no Technicolor grandeur. But it does have a candlelight dance floor that slowly goes dark, a woman standing alone on a bridge, and a little good luck charm that ends up being a most devastating souvenir for one old man.
For viewers who are drawn to good old weepies, few films land with greater force than the marvelous Waterloo Bridge.
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