Just an old fashioned love song
One I’m sure they wrote for you and me
Just an old fashioned love song
Coming down in three part harmony
Three Dog Night

That’s exactly what we’ve got here in the Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) 2018 film now streaming on Netflix.

The novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows was a great best-selling old-fashioned love story and quickly became a “woman’s must read.”

For this reviewer, always scanning the streamers for something, anything, to cut through the two viruses and vaccination info, “Guernsey” was just the thing.

In a clamshell: World War II, the bad Germans have invaded Guernsey (it wasn’t filmed there) and have taken over the island’s life.

Hold on now, there are a great deal of flashbacks going on here.

But before that, we meet British humor writer Juliet Ashton, orphaned by the war, (a compelling Lily James, “Downton Abby,” “Mamma Mia, Here We Go Again”) at the beginning, just at the end of the war, and then ahead to when she has a best-selling children’s book with “Izzy Bickerstaff Goes to War” and a best friend editor (Matthew Goode, also “Downton Abby” and “Watchmen.”)

Juliet, at the moment engaged to an American Army officer (Glen Powell) gets a touching letter from a pig farmer in Guernsey, asking her to help him get a Charles Lamb book.

The pig farmer is one of the Guernsey society book club, and as you will soon discover, a movie star handsome Michiel Huisman (“Game of Thrones”and “The Flight Attendant.”)

The two exchange several letters and before you know it, Juliet, intrigued by Dawsey Adams, bounces across the channel to Guernsey to meet him. When we first see them look into each other’s eyes, predictability rears its ugly head and we know where this is going.

We meet the rest of this incredible cast: Jessica Brown Findlay, Matthew Goode, the great Tom Courtenay (“Dr. Zhivago”) Katherine Parkinson and the amazing, gifted Penelope Wilton of, you guessed it, “Downton Abby.” Wilton will startle you with the best performance in the story.

There is mystery here, brought to us with a basket of clues: a handsome German officer/doctor, a little blonde girl, and couple of tear-jerking tragedies, all laid out for us at the conclusion of the film.

Will Juliet find her heart on the stormy beaches of Guernsey? When she departs with eyes full of tears, do we think she might return?

Predictable? Yes, syrupy at times, yes, but the delightful cast and the photography of cinematographer Zac Nicholson drew me in and overwhelmed my “inner feminine heart,” as it has others since the book and film appeared.

If you saw “Flight Attendant,” you’ll remember the dashing, dark and scrubby cheeked Huisman with his throat cut, who has a career in his pocket.

“The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” is a sweet and delicious, mysterious, heart-breaking love song, one “they wrote for you and me.” It’s a love letter movie from long ago, in safer days, a time we all wish we could go back to.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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