Editing Since You Went Away (section)

==Reception==
According to ''[[The New York Times]]'' critic [[Bosley Crowther]], ''Since You Went Away'' features a script with an "excess of exhausting emotional detail"; Crowther was impressed with the performances, but had issues with the film as a whole:<ref>[https://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=940CE7D8143EE03BBC4951DFB166838F659EDE ''Since You Went Away'', a Film of Wartime Domestic Life, With Claudette Colbert and Others, Opens at the Capitol], a July 21, 1944, review from ''The New York Times''</ref>

<blockquote>As the mother and center of the family, Claudette Colbert gives an excellent show of gallantly self-contained emotion, and Jennifer Jones is surpassingly sweet as a well-bred American daughter in the first bloom of womanhood and love. Robert Walker is uncommonly appealing as the young soldier whom she tragically adores, and Shirley Temple, now grown to "teen-age freshness", is pert as the young sister. Monty Woolley makes a full-blown character of the man who comes to lodge; Joseph Cotten is droll as the Navy playboy, and Hattie McDaniel does an Andy-act quite well... No doubt, this would have been a sharper picture if Mr. Selznick had played it in much less time, and it would have been considerably more significant had he kept it somewhat closer to average means. Two hours and fifty-one minutes is a lot of time to harp upon one well-known theme -lonesomeness and anxiety. And that is all this picture really does.</blockquote>

Literary critic [[Manny Farber]], writing in [[The New Republic]] registers this appraisal:

{{blockquote  | ''Since You Went Away'' holds religiously to a philosophy consisting in the ideas that only happy, virtuous or funny things happen in the American home, that only the pretty and the brave live there, that any complications should be more than balanced by happy rewards…As a whole, the picture is doughy and inconsequential as the bread you get in the grocery store…For its length, this is as ineffectual a movie as I ever saw.”<ref>Farber, 2009 p. 176-177: Composite quote, ellipsis inserted for brevity, meaning unchanged.”</ref>}}

In ''[[The Nation (magazine)| The Nation]]'' in 1944, critic [[James Agee]] wrote, "It is clear that Mr. Selznick thinks of it as ''the'' American home and that the Hiltons, who live in it, are supposed to be ''the'' American family. What he has managed{{nbsp}}... is an immense improvement on a ''Ladies' Home Journal'' story so sticky I couldn't get through it, which has, as he finishes it, something of the charm of an updated and cellophaned ''Little Women''. ''Since You Went Away'' is not a good film, by any standards I care for, and I would not dare to recommend it to anyone who cares exclusively for good films. But{{nbsp}}... I always enjoy and am interested in Mr. Selznick's particular blend of serious talent with smart, safe showmanship{{nbsp}}... this lively but aesthetically self-defeating, peculiar yet imitable style{{nbsp}}... "<ref>Agee, James - ''Agee on Film Vol.1'' © 1958 by The James Agee Trust</ref>

The movie was successful and earned $4,950,000 in North American rentals during its theatrical release, and over $7 million in rentals overall.<ref name="david"/><ref>"All-Time Top Grossers", ''Variety'', 8 January 1964 p 69</ref>