Waterloo Bridge (1940 Film) - Plot

Plot

The film opens on the eve of World War II. Roy Cronin, an officer in the British military, is seen standing in the nightscape of London’s Waterloo Bridge reminiscing of an earlier period in his life paralleling the present. He recalls such a night years ago, the outbreak of the First World War when he met Myra Lester, a ballerina who was the love of his life and hoped to make his wife. The story then unrolls as a flashback of Roy’s memories reliving that night and the events that followed.

Roy and Myra meet on Waterloo Bridge and strike up an immediate rapport with one and other. On parting, Myra invites Roy to attend that evening’s ballet performance. Roy, already enamored with the sweet, demure ballerina, cancels his dinner appointment with a fellow officer to attend the ballet. At the show’s end, Roy sends a note to Myra to join him for dinner. The note is intercepted by the directress of the ballet troupe, Madame Olga Kirowa who forbids Myra from continuing her relationship with Roy. The progression of their romance meets interference from Madame Olga, a fierce overseer with dictatorial power over the professional and personal lives of the dancers.

Madame Olga ultimately learns of Myra’s disobedience and dismisses her from the ballet troupe. Myra and another dancer, Kitty, who has sided with her friend is also asked to leave. Both young women then join together, sharing a small apartment. Unable to find legitimate employment, they face a dire financial situation. Belatedly, Myra, who believed that Kitty was working as a stage performer, learns her friend has been working as a prostitute to earn a living.

Roy is deployed to active military duty, assuring Myra that his family will look after her and safeguard her welfare while he is away. Subsequently, Myra and Roy’s mother, Lady Margaret Cronin arrange to meet at a teashop; their first introduction to each other. A pivotal point in the story, this encounter between Myra, the finance, and Lady Cronin, her prospective mother-in-law, sets in motion the pivotal events which will shape the intertwined fates that await Myra and Roy.

Waiting for Lady Cronin’s arrival, Myra scans a newspaper and is shocked to see her fiancé Roy listed among the casualty list of war dead. Dazed, almost immobilized with grief, recovering from a faint, and too much wine, the meeting with Roy’s mother is an awkward session of miscommunication, of things not said, and things misapprehended. From a humble background, Myra is reticent and apprehensive in the presence of the Duchess, the aristocratic, yet kindly Lady Cronin. She does not reveal her knowledge of Roy’s reported death. Lady Cronin gracefully retreats, baffled by Myra’s behavior. Too proud to reach out to Roy’s mother for help, the heartbroken Myra, feeling hopeless, subsequently takes up prostitution, too.

What next transpires is the tragic denouement of love lost, found, and then lost forever. Frequenting her usual haunt of the railroad station and offering herself to departing and arriving soldiers, Myra, as if confronted by a phantom, sees Roy, the man she long thought dead, but who, in reality, is alive and well. A reconciliation occurs -- a joyous one for Roy, a bittersweet one for Myra. The life she now leads has marked her with a reputation, which she feels is beyond redemption, unworthy of Roy’s love. She takes her own life under the wheels of a truck traversing Waterloo Bridge, the location where her love affair began and ultimately comes to its end.