Starting as shipboard rom-com between solo passengers on their way to NYC, Charles Boyer (Continental Rake) and Irene Dunne (ex-club singer/current publishing secretary), the two engaged, just not to each other. (And both peerless.) Shifting to dramatic romance and a decisive meet-up six months later at the Empire State Building, Leo McCarey’s genre mash-up looks better than it has in seven decades when R.K.O.’s original film elements were lost in transit to 20th/Fox where McCarey was remaking it for Cary Grant & Deborah Kerr as AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER/'57, a notably inferior effort. It got a lot of attention when some of the plot and a bit of the film showed in Nora Ephron’s typically anodyne SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE/’93.* Now, with the 1939 original restored by Lobster Films & MoMA from McCarey’s donated 35mm nitrate print (check out the before & after on Criterion) you can at long last really see it. McCarey, in the sweet spot of his career, between THE AWFUL TRUTH/’37 and GOING MY WAY/’44, seems unable to put a foot wrong. His loose, improvisatorial style, built in his early silent comedy days, entirely intuitive, finessing pivotal moments like the lovers’ visit with Boyer’s failing grandmother, to unexpected emotional levels. McCarey’s pay-to-play Catholicism held from treacle by his Personal Trinity: Faith, Sex and Comedy.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Enough attention to generate an unhappy third version: 1994's LOVE AFFAIR with Warren Beatty & Annette Bening.
CONTEST: How does Elvis Presley figure into this? A correct answer earns your choice of movie for a MAKSQUIBS Write-Up.
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