Flashing back from the 1929 stock market crash to the early days of World War I, Only Yesterday prefigures the plot of Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman. A young woman (Margaret Sullavan) spends the night with a handsome lieutenant (John Boles) about to leave for the front. She bears his child and eagerly awaits their reunion, only to discover when they meet again that he has forgotten her. As the woman who can never forget, Sullavan, in her screen debut, manages to be both insouciant and melancholy, manipulative and masochistic. Even while unlikely twists accrue, the self-aware script repeatedly underlines the difference between romantic fiction and “real life.” The heroine’s thoroughly modern aunt (Billie Burke) says of her niece’s unexpected pregnancy, “This sort of thing is no longer a tragedy. It isn’t even good melodrama.” The film both supports and disproves that argument.

—Juliet Clark