I lived through every minute of the 1950's. Our middle class lives had iron hoops of restraint, decorum, and sublimation that exploded in the 1960's. "An Affair to Remember" did nothing to disrupt those conventions.
Rather, it celebrated an escape from the merely comfortable. The central characters set their plush but routine lives aside to actively embrace love's uncertain adventure. They did so within boundaries that suburban households would have recognized and honored.
Two of the most accomplished actors ever to touch the giant screen took front and center. Their highly stylized, glamorously stylish portrayals presented enduring truths within a dramatic setting as ritualized as a classical Japanese Noh play. The truths came through the fully realized performances, not the formal devices used to frame them.
Don't look for the raw-edged 50's neo-realism of "La Strada" (Fellini, 1954, Italy), "Los Olvidados" (Bunuel, 1950, Mexico), "Roshomon" (Kurosawa, 1950, Japan), or "Pather Panchali" (Ray, 1954, India). Those films offered the illusion of naked life thrust at you in stark black and white. "On the Waterfront" (Kazan, 1954), "From Here To Eternity" (Zinnemann, 1953), and "Baby Doll" (Kazan, 1956) tried to capture that unguarded quality in more traditional Hollywood dramas.
"An Affair to Remember" has a look as alien to that approach to movie making as the filmed ballets of Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. In this aspect it certainly remains rooted to its time. John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956), Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958), and the musical "Oklahoma!" (1955) all partook of the same wide-screen, non-realistically-colored, highly-coded representation of existence which you find in "Affair".
If you must compare this studio-bound confection to film-making outside the Hollywood box, try the soulful Technicolor meditation Jean Renoir offered in "The River" (1951). There you have a French master going to India to recreate its look and heady spiritual atmosphere in his own image and likeness. We don't see the subcontinent of Satyajit Ray, but rather a cinema Impressionist's personal canvas.
The full title, "Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember", reminds us that you truly see McCarey's film, McCarey's vision, McCarey's world. Here the director put romance, sex, verbal wit, temptation, physical humor, responsibility, grace under pressure, destiny, and adult responses to life's caprices into the context of his own "Belle of the Nineties" (1934), "The Awful Truth" (1937), and "Going My Way" (1944).
He populated this pocket universe with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, icons who shared his perspective and could incarnate his values. Watch these masters of screencraft play knowingly with the lines and situations, much as Dame Margot and Nureyev invest staidly conventional choreography with their own vivacity.
A year later Grant strayed frivolously at Ingrid Bergman's side in "Indiscreet", while earthy lust had bedeviled Kerr throughout "The Black Narcissus" (1946). Take those movies as bracketing context and measure the differences. McCarey may have used a light touch, but he approached his material with deep seriousness.
In "Affair" Grant made a lover's sensitive responsiveness to a woman on her own terms feel right, proper, and manfully debonair. Kerr gave romantic attraction the priority it has for Jane Austen--not impassioned lunacy, but a well-grounded woman's due. Neither could tell what would come from actively committing to their love for each other.
Both knew the lives they'd led with other partners. In his case, he'd enjoyed quite a lot of exotic women. In hers, she had bonded with a good, stable man. Each set those prior ways aside in favor of crossing economic as well as emotional frontiers.
The next decade offered us "Never On Sunday" (1960) and "Tom Jones" (1963), "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966) and "Hud" (1963), all hugely influential pictures which abandoned Hollywood formulas about the sexes and helped revolutionize the 60's. In "Affair" we can see the conformities that partly defined Dwight Eisenhower's era supporting the idea that yes, you can free yourself from the predictable to love--really love--responsibly, but totally.
Rather, it celebrated an escape from the merely comfortable. The central characters set their plush but routine lives aside to actively embrace love's uncertain adventure. They did so within boundaries that suburban households would have recognized and honored.
Two of the most accomplished actors ever to touch the giant screen took front and center. Their highly stylized, glamorously stylish portrayals presented enduring truths within a dramatic setting as ritualized as a classical Japanese Noh play. The truths came through the fully realized performances, not the formal devices used to frame them.
Don't look for the raw-edged 50's neo-realism of "La Strada" (Fellini, 1954, Italy), "Los Olvidados" (Bunuel, 1950, Mexico), "Roshomon" (Kurosawa, 1950, Japan), or "Pather Panchali" (Ray, 1954, India). Those films offered the illusion of naked life thrust at you in stark black and white. "On the Waterfront" (Kazan, 1954), "From Here To Eternity" (Zinnemann, 1953), and "Baby Doll" (Kazan, 1956) tried to capture that unguarded quality in more traditional Hollywood dramas.
"An Affair to Remember" has a look as alien to that approach to movie making as the filmed ballets of Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. In this aspect it certainly remains rooted to its time. John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956), Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958), and the musical "Oklahoma!" (1955) all partook of the same wide-screen, non-realistically-colored, highly-coded representation of existence which you find in "Affair".
If you must compare this studio-bound confection to film-making outside the Hollywood box, try the soulful Technicolor meditation Jean Renoir offered in "The River" (1951). There you have a French master going to India to recreate its look and heady spiritual atmosphere in his own image and likeness. We don't see the subcontinent of Satyajit Ray, but rather a cinema Impressionist's personal canvas.
The full title, "Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember", reminds us that you truly see McCarey's film, McCarey's vision, McCarey's world. Here the director put romance, sex, verbal wit, temptation, physical humor, responsibility, grace under pressure, destiny, and adult responses to life's caprices into the context of his own "Belle of the Nineties" (1934), "The Awful Truth" (1937), and "Going My Way" (1944).
He populated this pocket universe with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, icons who shared his perspective and could incarnate his values. Watch these masters of screencraft play knowingly with the lines and situations, much as Dame Margot and Nureyev invest staidly conventional choreography with their own vivacity.
A year later Grant strayed frivolously at Ingrid Bergman's side in "Indiscreet", while earthy lust had bedeviled Kerr throughout "The Black Narcissus" (1946). Take those movies as bracketing context and measure the differences. McCarey may have used a light touch, but he approached his material with deep seriousness.
In "Affair" Grant made a lover's sensitive responsiveness to a woman on her own terms feel right, proper, and manfully debonair. Kerr gave romantic attraction the priority it has for Jane Austen--not impassioned lunacy, but a well-grounded woman's due. Neither could tell what would come from actively committing to their love for each other.
Both knew the lives they'd led with other partners. In his case, he'd enjoyed quite a lot of exotic women. In hers, she had bonded with a good, stable man. Each set those prior ways aside in favor of crossing economic as well as emotional frontiers.
The next decade offered us "Never On Sunday" (1960) and "Tom Jones" (1963), "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966) and "Hud" (1963), all hugely influential pictures which abandoned Hollywood formulas about the sexes and helped revolutionize the 60's. In "Affair" we can see the conformities that partly defined Dwight Eisenhower's era supporting the idea that yes, you can free yourself from the predictable to love--really love--responsibly, but totally.