James Hilton published Random Harvest in 1941. Like his earlier books Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon, it became a runaway best seller.

Hilton took the title from a British war report: "According to a British Official Report, bombs fell at random." He motivated the connection by naming the protagonist's family manor Random Hall.

MGM bought the rights to Hilton's novel for $50,000 the year it came out, thinking it might be a good vehicle for contract star Spencer Tracy.

After notable hits in the '30s -- including the first Bulldog Drummond film (1929), A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Lost Horizon (1937) and The Light That Failed (1939) -- Ronald Colman's career had faltered when his first two films of the '40s, Lucky Partners (1940) and My Life With Caroline (1941), fared poorly with fans and critics. Now in his '50s, Colman feared his career was drawing to a close until he scored a hit with George Stevens' The Talk of the Town (1942). The film put him back on the radar and encouraged MGM to cast him in his most popular film of the decade, Random Harvest. It was his first MGM film since A Tale of Two Cities seven years earlier.

When Colman's services became available after the success of Talk of the Town, MGM dropped plans to star Tracy in Random Harvest and rushed to sign Colman instead.

Colman's life paralleled the character's in many ways. Both had grown up in the same part of England. Both had served in World War I and been released with medical discharges (Rainier, a shellshock victim; Colman with a shattered ankle). Both had faced postwar life with a degree of alienation and a sense of loss and had overcome those feelings through artistic work: Charles as a writer; Colman as an actor. Colman had been one of Greer Garson's idols when she was a young girl. She was delighted with the chance to finally work with him.

Both Colman and Garson had scored hits in earlier adaptations of Hilton's works: Colman in Lost Horizon (1937) and Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), which made her an overnight sensation in her first American film.

The other plum role in the film was Colman's fianc¿ Kitty. LeRoy cast young Susan Peters, hoping he could mentor her to stardom as he had done with Loretta Young, Ginger Rogers and, most notably, Lana Turner. Although she would turn in a fine performance and win an Oscar® nomination, her career would be cut short a few years later when she was paralyzed in a hunting accident. She played a few roles in a wheelchair -- including the title heroine of Miss Susan (1951), a television series about a lawyer detective that preceded Raymond Burr's wheelchair-bound Ironside by almost two decades. -- before she died in 1952 at the age of 31. Some observers suggested she had died of a broken heart.

Shortly after Franklin signed Peters for the role, MGM hired a young Australian actress named Ann Richards, who looked enough like Garson to have been her younger sister. Since Kitty's resemblance to Paula was a key plot point, Franklin told Richards that he should have waited and cast her, but he wasn't going to go back on his agreement with Peters. Instead, he cast Richards as another family member. She and Colman felt like family anyway; she had gone to school in Australia with his brother, Eric's, children.

The Production Code Administration demanded certain changes in the novel to make it acceptable for filming. In particular, they demanded that Rainier's first wife be omitted so the character would not be a bigamist, however unwittingly, and that there be no indication that he and Paula had intimate relations before their first marriage.

by Frank Miller