The Enchanted Cottage is a 1945 American supernatural romance film starring Dorothy McGuire, Robert Young, and Herbert Marshall, with Mildred Natwick.

John Hillgrove, a blind pianist, proceeds to perform his tone poem titled "The Enchanted Cottage," which he wrote in their honor.

Later that night, a honeymoon party is planned for the engaged couple, but Oliver sends a letter stating he will be unable to arrive.

By nighttime, Oliver receives a letter from his mother, Mrs. Price, but he refuses to see her and his stepfather due to how he looks with his war injuries.

However, Mrs. Price mentions Laura's "not being pretty" while complimenting her character before she leaves, which breaks the spell of their mutual illusion, and they're "transformed" back to their former selves.

According to Jeremy Arnold of TCM, Robert Young told Leonard Maltin in a 1986 interview that he considered The Enchanted Cottage to be "the best love story that's ever been written.

Young later named a home he built in California “The Enchanted Cottage.”[2] Arthur Wing Pinero's play, written in 1921 and first performed in 1922,[3] was filmed in 1924 as a timely story involving physical and emotional disabilities following the First World War.

The original play and film were set in England, and the history of the “honeymoon” couples extended back into the Tudor period.

The cast of the play is larger, including the local rector and his wife, and the couple's blind friend, Major Hillgrove, believes in the transformation unlike the character portrayed by Herbert Marshall.

[3] RKO Producer Harriet Parsons acquired the rights for her studio for an updated World War II version set in New England.

[5] Composer Roy Webb wrote a piano concerto for the film that a blinded World War I veteran (Herbert Marshall) uses as a tone poem to describe the story of the two protagonists to a gathering of their friends.

Marshall, who had lost a leg in World War I, played his role as a blind man with the help of special contact lenses.

Writing for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther observed[6] [The play and first film] concerned the illusion of beauty and the moral courage which was mutually found by a homely girl and a maimed war veteran when they viewed each other through the eyes of love.

Despite all the marvelous advances in plastic surgery, it assumes that a shattered Air Force pilot would be returned to society with a face very badly disfigured and frightening to behold.

And it violates an obvious tenet of feminine beauty culture today—which is that a girl of moderate features (and fair intelligence) can make herself look very sweet.

It is hard to believe that a depressed veteran's entire recuperation would be allowed to devolve upon a fustrated [sic] girl, an intuitive blind man and a honeymoon cottage possessing charm.

And it is fair to insist that no young lady with a face and figure such as that of Dorothy McGuire would permit herself to look so dingy and woebegone as she does in this film.A review in Variety on December 31, 1944 stated: “Sensitive love story of a returned war veteran with ugly facial disfigurements, and the homely slavey—both self-conscious of their handicaps—is sincerely told both in the script [based on the play by Arthur Wing Pinero] and outstanding direction of John Cromwell.”[7] In 2018, Jeremy Arnold wrote for Turner Classic Movies that The Enchanted Cottage is a movie with its heart in the right place.