An Affair to Remember

Movie Review: An Affair to Remember

Year of Release: 1957
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Leo McCarey
Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Richard Denning, Neva Patterson, Cathleen Nesbitt

Plot outline: A couple falls in love and agrees to meet in six months at the Empire State Building - but will it happen? (IMDb)

An Affair to Remember is a remake of the director's 1939 movie Love Affair, one of the best pre-World War II romances, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. Now, with the roles of those two worthies filled by Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, it reruns the same romantic fable that was covered in 1939. It tells, once again, the heartbreak story of two worldlings who meet aboard a ship while each is en route to America to enter matrimony with vastly wealthy mates, fall in love, make an oddly reasoned bargain to marry each other in six months (if still in love, after that length of time not seeing each other), then hit an unsuspected snag. As before, the attraction of this fable is in the velvety way in which two apparently blasée people treat the experience of actually finding themselves in love. This is an immature emotion that is loaded with surprise. And the old script of Love Affair provides plenty of humorous conversation that is handled crisply in the early reels by Grant and Kerr. Likewise, the scene in which the worldlings visit the aged grandmother of the man at her villa on the French Riviera is repeated, pretty much in toto, with agreeable sentiment. Cathleen Nesbitt is good as the grandmother, a role formerly played by Maria Ouspenskaya. But something goes wrong with the movie, after the couple get off the ship and abandon that area of romantic illusion for the down-to-earth realities of dry land. The marriage pact seems ridiculously childish for a couple of adult people to make. The lady's failure to notify her fiancé of her accident seems absurd. The fact that the man does not hear of it in some way is beyond belief. And the slowness with which he grasps the obvious when he calls upon the lady is just too thick. Nevertheless, the movie was a huge success. Contributing to the success is its theme song "An Affair to Remember" or "Our Love Affair" composed by Harry Warren with lyrics by Leo McCarey and Harold Adamson. The song is sung by Vic Damone during the opening credits and then sung later by Kerr's character (dubbed by Marni Nixon, who also dubbed for Kerr in the movie The King and I). (NYT)

My judgement: *** out of 4 stars