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This Film On

An Affair to Remember

(1957)

115 min. 20th Century Fox. Director: Leo McCarey. Cast: Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Richard Denning, Neva Patterson, Cathleen Nesbitt.

The swoony romantic melodrama An Affair to Remember doesn't touch the depths of a Douglas Sirk picture, but it has its selling points. A prime slab of '50s beef directed by veteran Leo McCarey (Duck Soup, Make Way for Tomorrow, The Awful Truth), the picture includes CinemaScope photography and four gratuitous songs, including "An Affair to Remember (Our Love Affair)," sung by Vic Damone over the opening credits. But the real reason An Affair to Remember escaped from cable purgatory (no, not its celebration in Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle) is the pair of top-billed actors: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.

With this remake of 1939's Love Affair, McCarey decided not to fix what weren't broke, making few changes to the original script by Delmer Daves and Donald Ogden Stewart (McCarey and Mildred Cram get credit for the new screenplay). Grant plays Nickie Ferrante, the archetypal international playboy. When the film opens, Ferrante is taking an ocean liner from Europe to New York, where his fiancée awaits to finally make an honest man of him. But fate intervenes when he can't seem to avoid fellow passenger Terry McKay (Kerr), who also happens to be engaged. Since Ferrante and his engagement are big news, people begin to talk, and even though Nickie and Terry make every effort to be apart, they keep comically—and publicly—colliding.

Drawn to each other's wit and charm, the two decide to spend some platonic time together away from prying eyes, as Nickie visits his grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt) during a stopover in the French Riviera. Well, seeing Nickie with his dear old grandmother and learning of his sensitive soul prove too much for Terry, and Nickie, too, knows he's met one in a million. So the pair agree to meet in six month's time at the top of the Empire State Building, giving them enough time and decorum to dispatch with their romantic commitments, assuming of course they don't change their minds. But just as fate had a funny way of bringing them together, it has a tragic way of keeping them apart, with circumstances further complicated by shame and self-doubt.

The light farce of the film's first act is so deft that the picture's midsection inevitably sags, and the forced charm of Terry's classroomful of choir students singing the corn-syrupy "The Tiny Scout (He Knows You Inside Out)" is an all-too-transparent attempt at an "eleven o'clock lift." But Grant and Kerr are terrific together (their easy charm coming in part from an invitation to improvise a bit), and whenever they share the screen, all is forgiven, never more so than in the devastating emotional nakedness of the film's final moments. "Weepies" may not be high art, but for those who love them, An Affair to Remember is the Mona Lisa.

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