An Affair To Remember

Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great filma tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences. A playboy (Cary Grant) and a nightclub singer (Deborah Kerr) meet and fall in love on a luxury liner headed for New York; each is romantically committed to someone else, but they agree to meet at a future date if they can disentangle themselves from their commitments. Neither star ever showed quite this much delicacy before or after, and McCarey’s elliptical way of framing key emotional moments meshes perfectly with their sublime performances. 115 min. (JR)

This entry was posted in Featured Texts. Bookmark the permalink.