Love Affair (1939)
(click here for the Romanian version)
Firstly I saw Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail, the 1998 romantic comedy played by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. I didn't know by then that it was a remake: after ten years I found a DVD copy of The Shop Around the Corner, the first version of this romance, from 1940, having Ernst Lubitsch as director, and starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. Maybe it would be good to analyze them in parallel, to see how the same cinematic story has changed during the years. But it's another movie I want here to tell about.
I enjoyed You've Got Mail enormously. I was using a Mac by that time, as the protagonists were doing, and I was expecting email every evening the same way.
As it happens with this kind of movies, You've Got Mail came on various TV channels many times and I watched it always with pleasure. The memories of my 1998 experiences with MacIntosh, and the stories around my emails from that time? Just kidding.
Then came Sleepless in Seattle, an earlier production of Nora Ephron, from 1993, starring the same couple, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, a movie that I hadn't the chance to see till the late 2000's. By the way, the Romanian rendering of the title was great, Nopti Albe in Seattle (White Nights in Seattle), sending people with cultural obsessions like me toward Dostoevsky, wow! I loved the movie, as it was made definitely with guts, a science of following a romance while keeping a lucid eye, and directing the story toward the deck of Empire State Building without falling in the bucket of syrup. By the way, it revived my own romantic memories of one evening spent on the same deck: Nora Ephron knows where to touch males my age, it seems.
This movie, Sleepless in Seattle was teasingly referencing a classic romance, linked also to the deck of Empire State Building. A story told by successive movies, that had set a legend: I hadn't seen any of them, however I was feeling the charm of the legend, so strong it was. It was after Sleepless in Seattle that I had the chance to watch on TV Love Affair, the movie from 1994 (so after the movie of Nora Ephron was made) directed by Glenn Gordon Caron, starring Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, and featuring Katharine Hepburn.
Sleepless in Seattle was referencing another version of the story, from 1957: An Affair to Remember, directed by Leo McCarey, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, with Cathleen Nesbitt in the supporting role.
And the romance played by Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr was also a remake! The original version was made in 1939: Love Affair, directed by the same Leo McCarey, starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, and having the personage of Grandma Janou played by Maria Ouspenskaya. Was the movie from 1939 the first one in history saying that the things we like best are either illegal, immoral or fattening? Who knows?
A romance, incredible like any romance, living its life throughout the years, 1939, 1957, 1994, played for successive generations of dreamers by successive generations of fatal lovers, by Charles Boyer, Cary Grant, Warren Beatty, by Irene Dunne, Deborah Kerr, Annette Bening, with the great old dame living recluse and remembering great old times, impersonated by great old dames of cinema, Maria Ouspenskaya, Cathleen Nesbitt, Katharine Hepburn. A romance, with its part of melodrama, like any love story coming on the screen, with its parts of decency and delicacy to balance the melodrama and to keep the story away from ridicule: a great romance.
The boat journeying from France to America became through successive remakes a plane departed from Australia, Madeira became some tiny island in the Pacific, the songs changed, the way they were dressed, these guys, followed successive tastes; the story remained the same, wonderful and magic.
I wouldn't tell the story to you, you can find it for instance on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Affair_%281939_film%29. Better see the movie from 1939, here it is:
(Filmofilia)
posted by Pierre Radulescu at
2:00 PM
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