The Lost Valentine

Every 14 February, an old woman goes back to the same railway station to wait for a husband who never came home from the Second World War. That ritual is where 'The Lost Valentine' begins, the television film CBS broadcast on 30 January 2011 as the 241st Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation. Darnell Martin directed it from the novel James Michael Pratt published in 1998 as 'The Last Valentine', and it rests on Betty White, who shot it at 88, and Jennifer Love Hewitt, who came to it off five seasons of 'Ghost Whisperer' on the same network and is also one of its executive producers.

Susan Allison is a television reporter who has to put together a piece on Caroline Thomas for Valentine's week. Caroline, who has gone back every year since the war to the platform where she said goodbye to Lieutenant Neil Thomas, a Navy pilot posted missing in the Pacific, wants nothing to do with a camera. Her grandson Lucas, whose life revolves around looking after her, is wary of the reporter at first and ends up being the one who opens the door.

Her memories reach back to 1943: the quick courtship, the wedding, the house the two of them did up, the valentine she made by hand and gave him at the station, the carved wooden aeroplane he sent for the baby she was carrying. Then the letters stopped and a telegram arrived. As Susan pulls at the thread, helped by a senator and by the family of another man from Neil's crew, the search keeps pushing her towards Lucas and leaves her own relationship with Andrew Hawthorne, a photographer who is hardly ever around, hanging.

Meghann Fahy, years before 'The White Lotus', plays the young Caroline, and Billy Magnussen, later a familiar face in 'Game Night' and 'No Time to Die', plays the missing lieutenant. Sean Faris, the lead in 'Never Back Down', is the grandson, and Will Chase the photographer. The shoot ran 25 days in the autumn of 2010, nearly all of it in Atlanta: the interior of the Georgia State Capitol stood in for the station waiting room, the exterior was filmed in Chattanooga, and a park beside the Chattahoochee river became a burnt-out Filipino village.

The audience was remarkable for a TV movie: 14.53 million viewers, first in its slot and the best Hallmark Hall of Fame figure in four years. Brian Lowry wrote in Variety that White was the best reason to watch it, and she went to the Screen Actors Guild ceremony that January 2012 up for best female actor in a television movie. A month later the film took Movieguide's Faith & Freedom Award for television. For Rose Nylund from 'The Golden Girls', who died on 31 December 2021, seventeen days before her hundredth birthday, it was one of her last leading roles.

• Drama
• Romance