Made during the first full year in which the U.S. was involved in World War II, Random Harvest achieved success partly because its depiction of a shell-shocked veteran adjusting to peacetime life captured the anxieties and post-war mood of its era.

With its record-setting success, Random Harvest was prominently featured in MGM promotional materials. Among them were two short films: "Partners" (1943), which spotlighted such rising stars as Susan Peters, and "Some of the Best" (1944), a 20th anniversary salute to the studio narrated by Lionel Barrymore.

In Chapter 19 of J.D. Salinger's modern classic The Catcher in the Rye the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, sees Random Harvest at the Radio City Music Hall.

Other films using amnesia as the catalyst for a romantic story include Terence Fisher's Song of Tomorrow (1948), in which a man with amnesia falls in love with an opera singer whose voice is the only thing he remembers from his lost past, and Sergio Rubini and Dominick Tambasco's La Bionda (1992), in which Nastassia Kinski forgets her life of crime and falls in love with a disabled man (Sergio Rubini).

Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman took the roles created by Garson and Colman, respectively, for a spoof of the film on The Carol Burnett Show. Film critic Pauline Kael, never a big fan of Garson or MGM's more serious films, preferred the take-off to the original. "At least it was shorter," she wrote in 5,001 Nights at the Movies.

by Frank Miller