LOVE AFFAIR (Leo McCarey, 1939)
Mawkish and smart-alecky, Love Affair was directed by Leo McCarey between Oscars. It was a huge hit, and McCarey remade it as An Affair to Remember (1957), which proved an even bigger hit and an even greater artistic disaster. The original is at least minimally watchable. Warren Beatty remade the film in 1994, with himself…
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Dennis Grunes
Mawkish and smart-alecky, Love Affair was directed by Leo McCarey between Oscars. It was a huge hit, and McCarey remade it as An Affair to Remember (1957), which proved an even bigger hit and an even greater artistic disaster. The original is at least minimally watchable. Warren Beatty remade the film in 1994, with himself and wife Annette Bening in the roles that Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne originated, and Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr inherited.

Michel (Boyer, charming and touching), a French playboy, and Terry, an American one-time singer homeward bound after traveling alone abroad, meet onboard ship and fall in love. Terry is engaged to be married. Nevertheless, the new couple plan on reuniting on top of the Empire State Building in six months. En route to keeping the date, Terry is hit by a car and crippled; meanwhile, Michel assumes he has been stood up. In truth, Michel has been sacrificed on the altar of Terry’s guilty pride. She robs them both of happiness, preferring to nurture a bad case of egotistical nobility. But Michel finds out the truth.

It is an idiotic role—however, her favorite—that Dunne plays none too well, with ill-fitting echoes of her performance in McCarey’s marvelous The Awful Truth (1937). But only someone capable of overlooking Terry’s nowhere-acknowledged pathology could buy into this attenuated “entertainment.”

Is there any reason to see this movie? Well, yes. Boyer plays his part better than anyone else will, and Maria Ouspenskaya is superb as Michel’s elderly grandmother, who becomes a kind of spiritual link between the two lovers. (Ouspenskaya manages the feat of reminding me of both my grandmothers.) A fleeting mortal shiver that strikes her at the piano constitutes one of the most memorable moments of Hollywood acting ever.