Elle et lui

I've had this DVD in my collection for several years now, having picked it up cheap at a Black Friday sale. Deborah Kerr's unfortunate passing finally got me to pull it out. Should have went with my first choice, Black Narcissus, instead. An Affair to Remember starts off fine, with Cary Grant and Kerr, both engaged to be married, meeting on a voyage across the Atlantic. The first half of the film follows them as they try to avoid each other, but end up falling in love anyway. As they are about to part ways, they agree to meet each other in six months at the top of the Empire State building. So far, it's lovely. Unfortunately, there's an hour left, and, where the first half was a lovely romantic comedy, the second half is all dull melodrama. When Cary and Kerr are apart, the sizzle between them burns out pretty much instantly. And then the film inserts a bunch of precocious children, whom Kerr teaches to sing. There were a couple of fine child actors in classic Hollywood, but the vast majority of them seem like they are being fed lines two seconds before the camera comes on, and then they just repeat it out of rote. If there's a Hell, I'll be surrounded by kids who appeared in classic movies.

Grant's charming philanderer Nicky Ferrante, a renowned bachelor, and Kerr's American nightclub singer Terry McKay meet aboard a transatlantic luxury liner steaming back to New York via Naples and surrender—in the midst of good humor—to their undeniable chemistry…

Unfortunately, both are hampered with others lovers… At the end of the voyage, they make a promise… In six months, if both are free they will reunite at the top of the Empire State Building, "the nearest thing they have to heaven in New York."

In the day of the meeting, the reformed Grant put his paintbrushes away and luckily paces the skyscraper's roof, but Kerr, looking up to heaven to see him, is involved in a serious accident…

What fallows is almost unbelievable as Grant yields to pompous cynicism, unaware Kerr is too proud to let him know the truth…

With four Oscar nominations, and with attractive settings as the French Riviera, and two appealing beautiful people sharing pink champagne, Leo McCarey's pretty good romantic film gives off flashes of gaiety and sways with longing hearts to be filled with love and life

I do love this film so and one thing it has that the original Love Affair did not have was that great title song, sung over the credits by Vic Damone. It was composed by Harry Warren and Harold Adamson and it's one of the great movie themes of all time. Guaranteed to put you in the mood for romance and tears.

This version with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr sticks pretty close to the original with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne. Two people, each engaged to others, meet on shipboard and fall in love. It's one of those chemical things that no one can help.

Grant's a playboy who candidly admits he's never worked a day in his life and Kerr wants a bit more security than that. They agree to meet at the top of the Empire State Building in exactly six months to see if the sparks are still there. But something is always interrupting the course of history and romance.

Can't say much more than that, but as Kerr reminds Grant if they don't meet it will be for a darn good reason and if you see the film you'll agree she had one.

This was the second of three films that Grant and Kerr made together and this is easily the best of them. I don't think Cary Grant was ever more romantic on the screen and that is saying something.

Cathleen Nesbitt though old enough to be his mother, plays Cary's grandmother in grand old world style. Her part had previously been played by Maria Ouspenskaya and later on in the Warren Beatty-Annette Bening remake was done by Katharine Hepburn.

If your taste run to screen romances, this is THE film you do not dare miss.

This film has to be probably the best romantic film I've ever seen, even above Gone With The Wind, but on the same level as The English Patient (my favorite film of all time). I got intrigued by this film back in high school when my sister dragged me to see Sleepless in Seattle. I caught the references to this film that Meg Ryan made throughout that film and thought that I'd like to rent this film (Affair to Remember) to see what the commotion was about. Needless to say, with the whole "shipboard romance" aspect of it, and the promise to meet again in six months atop the Empire State Building of all places, I quickly became hooked. The scene on the French Riviera with Nickie's grandmother playing the piano, oh God is it beautiful! Cary Grant is so debonair and suave and Deborah Kerr is so ravishing and stunningly beautiful, that it always demands repeated viewing from me (at least three times a year). Seeing this film always makes me wonder if something like the kind of relationship that Nickie had with Terry in the film would really be possible. Would and could someone actually leave the person they were engaged to to marry a complete and total stranger that they just met days ago? I'd like to think that it could, but then I am nothing but a hopeless romantic. The final scene always tears my heart out, no matter how many times I've seen it, I'm always sobbing. Watching this film around Valentine's Day (even if you are single) is always a treat. It allows our fantasies to take flight so that we may think that we are actually the one meeting our beloved atop the Empire State Building in a thunderstorm. Watch with a box of Kleenex nearby. My rating: 4 stars

"An Affair to Remember" is an almost perfect film. It is as deep and rich as it is stylish and romantic.

And if someone tells you it is just a soap opera -- that person would be very, very wrong.

Yes, the film has style to burn. Deborah Kerr was never more beautiful. Her skin looks like cream; her pert, pinched nose like a blossom. She's never been more appealing than she is here. The scene where she smiles from a boat at her fiancé on shore alone is worth the price of admission.

Cary Grant seems to sleep in tuxedos. He is a walking model of male perfection.

Less observant viewers come away from this movie thinking that nothing happened, that nothing was ever at stake, that nothing was risked or gained. How wrong they are.

Kerr's amazing dresses -- how about the one with the pumpkin colored ribbons woven through the front? -- Grant's suavity, and the south of France settings are not just there to pose for the camera.

All of the beauty of this film is there to do very hard work -- to tell a less than beautiful story.

And, no, this is not a movie where nothing happens. Something is happening in every scene -- you just have to be paying attention, and you just have to be mature enough, or have your antenna up high enough, to catch the subtle messages the film is sending, and to feel in your own solar plexus, the resonances of loves, dreams, and selves risked and gained, or lost.

Nicki and Terry are both gambling much here. They are wounded people in a world of high glamor; they speak in arch codes, even as their hearts are bleeding, or their breath is caught against the cage of dreams.

Grant's character, Nicki Ferrante, is a lazy gigolo. "Gigolo" is a pretty word for an ugly situation. Ferrante is a talented artist, but he knows that he can market something else he does -- seduce women -- far more easily, and for a higher price, than he can get for his paintings.

Kerr's character, Terry McKay, as she says, had to grow up very fast, and fight off a boss who -- well -- she faced some bad stuff in her life. When a steady, but less than thrilling, man offered to set her up, she, no fool, took the offer.

These are two beautiful people swanning through life over some very ugly circumstances. They have both sold their best selves for easy money.

And, then, completely by chance, on shipboard, they meet their soul mates. This meeting doesn't just present them with an opportunity for a one night stand. It demands that they face their own fears, and become their best selves.

I'm one of those cynical people who doesn't believe in love, never mind soul mates, but this movie carries it all off so well, it makes me believe.

Grant and Kerr begin with the lightest, and subtlest, of exchanges. they say things to each other -- example: "I'd be surprised if you were surprised" -- that, if you are not paying attention and that if you don't know a lot about life -- would just go over your head.

Slowly but surely their effervescent, and yet irresistible, attraction becomes truly heavy. The scene with Grandmere Janou (Cathleen Nesbit) is amazing for all it says, without actually saying anything.

I could see a naive film-goer taking in that scene and then asking, "What was the point of that scene?" You really have to have your eyes on the screen, and have a sensitivity to human interactions. Who is looking at whom; whose face is suddenly hidden and why; who is saying what without actually saying it; and why does the sound of that boat whistle bring tears -- you have to be willing to pay attention, and to have a sense of life and human relationships, and, yes, an openness to the possibility of there being a God to understand that scene.

Here you have a man and a woman who have, basically, sold themselves to the highest bidder, and who, at that point, are perilously close to cheating. What happens? Their love is blessed by the Virgin Mary. Heavy stuff.

"We changed our course today." Truer words were never spoken.

I've got to hand it to Leo McCarey, who wrote and directed this film as well as the Academy Award winning "Going My Way." He so wonderfully brings the best, and most complex, aspects of Catholicism to the screen here. Catholicism is associated with the romance languages -- French, Italian -- and it also is friendly to this kind of romance -- a romance where fallen beauties are blindsided by the kind of tortuous, redemptive, overwhelming, fated love that demands, and gets, everything, after which, you are never the same.

If you haven't seen the movie, or "Sleepless in Seattle," I won't reveal the ending to you. I'll just say that merely thinking about the ending can make me cry such tears as, really, very few films I've ever seen can make me cry. These tears are their own species.