An Affair to Remember

An Affair to Remember (1957)

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AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER

Reviewed by Heather Picker

Directed by Leo McCarey. Written by Delmar Daves and Leo McCarey. Starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, with Richard Denning and Cathleen Nesbitt. 1957, 115 min., Not Rated.

Warning!: Hey kids, this is still pretty much what I wrote when I was 16 and it sucks tremendously! Will be re-written eventually.

In 1939, Leo McCarey directed Love Affair, starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne. The film was a critical success and McCarey was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar (with co-writer Mildred Cram). In 1957 he decided to remake it, and although its predecessor is easily superior, at the time of its release An Affair to Remember won over audiences and received four Academy Award nominations.

It opens with news segments from different parts of the world, all announcing the engagement of Nickie "The Big Dame Hunter" Ferrante (Cary Grant) to Lois Clark, a fabulously rich member of an even more fabulously rich family. Nickie is on a cruise from Paris to New York, and along the way meets Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr), a former nightclub singer. Having been swept off her feet and out of the clubs by her businessman boyfriend, Kenneth (Richard Denning), Terry is now focusing on learning the kind of skills that will be necessary when she becomes his wife. Of course, Nickie and Terry fall in love.

A photographer stalks about the ship, secretly snapping photos of the pair, who are resisting but not denying their growing attraction. Nickie is a well-known playboy, and Terry, who is reticent to acknowledge why she distrusts him (or rather, herself around him) agrees to accompany him on shore one day, when he goes to visit his grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt). They spend the day together and get along well, the tension between them obvious. Grandma Janou, when proposing a toast, instead of toasting Nick's impending marriage to Lois, looks fondly at Nick and Terry, glasses raised, and says, "May your voyage home be a pleasant one."

Returning to the ship, they finally relent, and, in one of the most famous proposals in cinematic history, decide that in six months they will meet atop the Empire State Building. During this time, they will get their acts together and decide what they want. If they both show up, they will be married. Fate has a different idea in store, and the ship crashes into an iceberg. Terry survives and stares longingly into her beloved's deep blue final resting place as Celine Dion music swells in the background. Oops, wrong boat movie.

The first part of An Affair to Remember, carried by Grant's comedic charms and Kerr's engaging performance, sets a nice pace for the rest of the film, but the final twenty minutes are overwrought enough to nearly undo it all. The obvious symbolism of unsteady shots of the sea and boat were a heavy-handed the first time and didn't lose any weight when recycled.

Grant and Kerr's chemistry isn't as magnetic as that of Grant and Katharine Hepburn, or Grant and Ingrid Bergman, or Grant and Tony Curtis, but still works out nicely. His blend of suavity and Kerr's graceful uncertainty lend themselves to many clever shipboard shots (i.e., when she is on the stairs and he is walking in circles around the staircase; the night at the dining hall when they are unwittingly sitting in back-to-back booths) with the kind of outcome that is rarely seen in films outside of that time in Hollywood. An element of dated, saccharine-soaked implausibility is thrown into the mix when Terry takes a position as a music teacher at a parochial school. Children sing twice when once would have more than sufficed.

McCarey, who directed Grant (opposite Irene Dunne) in the 1937 screwball comedy classic The Awful Truth, has some genuinely great shots in this movie. Grant and Kerr, who would re-team in Stanley Donen's 1960 comedy The Grass is Greener, are up to their expected levels of greatness. Richard Denning is competent as erstwhile Kenneth and Cathleen Nesbitt gives an excellent supporting performance as Grandmother Janou. Remade in 1994 as Love Affair. A 20th Century Fox release.

Availability: An Affair to Remember is available on video and DVD.

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