An Affair to Remember

"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.

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.

This film has to be the best romantic film that I've ever seen, even above Gone With the Wind, and Casablanca, but on the same level as The English Patient (my favorite film of all time). After I saw Sleepless in Seattle when I was in high school and caught the many references to this film, I decided to check it out for myself. 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 that takes place 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 viewings from me (at least twice a year).

Seeing this film always makes me wonder if something like the kind of relationship describes within this film would actually BE possible in real life. Would and could someone actually leave the person they were engaged to in order to marry a complete and total stranger they just met days ago? I'd like to think that it could, but then again 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 the fourteenth day of February (even if you are single) is always a treat. It allows our fantasies to take wing so that we may think we are actually the one meeting our beloved atop the Empire State Building in a thunderstorm.

Watch this film with a box of industrial-strength kleenex nearby.

My rating: 4 stars

...especially if that man is being played by Cary Grant! I'm not going to spoil it for you by repeating WHAT Grant's character says that sounds ridiculous, I'll let you watch and find out. I'd just like to know what kind of bucks the studio held out to Grant to get him to speak some of these lines, which are mainly the lines every woman wants to hear from a man who looks and moves like Cary Grant.

The idea behind this film is that two people on the threshold of middle age - at least in the 1950's - meet on a long cruise and fall in love. So far, so good. But there are complications, or else there would be no movie. Both are involved with wealthy members of the opposite sex and have no money or real skills of their own. They agree to try to make a go of it independently, having no contact with the other, and to meet at the top of the Empire State Building six months from the day of landing in New York if all works out. Complications ensue.

You are obviously setting yourself up for disaster or at least miscommunication and bitterness if you say things like "if one of us doesn't show up, no questions". No grudge maybe, but no questions, no bothering to find out what went wrong? Wouldn't it just eat at you not knowing during the six months if the other person just forgot all about this plan in the first place and you are eking out a living for nothing? I shall now prepare to be pelted by eggs, tomatoes, and tear stained handkerchiefs.

What one has to consider about the Deborah Kerr/Cary Grant characters is that they are both "kept" individuals: Kerr by a wealthy Texan named Ken (-doll, played by Richard Denning), Grant a gigolo engaged to an heiress (Neva Patterson). They meet on an ocean cruise, with this some cute and also silly comedy thrown in. Kerr & Grant are British and speak the accents yet their characters are from the U.S.; a not too distracting error, however. An unusually touching scene is when they de-bark in Italy and visit Grant's 82-year-old grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt). It's a beautiful setting with wonderful music and pathos. Back in the states the couple agree to meet atop the Empire State Building in 6 months. One wonders why Kerr won't marry the handsome Denning, athletic, wealthy and kind (in real-life the actor was married to the British-raised actress Evelyn Ankers, a beauty in the Kerr-mold). Much of the second half is infused with un-necessary scenes of singing children but this all leads up the the final, long scene, beautifully acted and directed (by Leo McCarey). A mystery is very slowly unraveled in layers until the peak of the scene, scored by the emotional title theme song. This scene "gets" one every time, that's how effective it is. Beautiful costumes, scenery, clever photography (note the scene where the open patio door reveals the Empire State Building in its reflection), great cast make this an enduring, never-forgotten golden classic.