Not being into melodrama, I've never had a desire to see "An Affair To Remember" & my familiarity was limited to its homage in ""Sleepless In Seattle". Its been awhile, but ironically on my own last sleepless night in Leon, Iowa I decided to listen in the dark to some old radio dramas by the Screen Guild Theater from the 1940's. My spider sense should have been tingling venturing into the third randomly selected broadcast in a row that involved cruises to or from Rio, but found myself listening to an adaption of 1939's "Love Affair" & becoming increasingly obsessing on the idea that a disabled woman should choose to hide herself away, that it was somehow noble to let someone she loved think she'd disappeared rather than burden him with something apparently considered to be a darker fate. All is well with the mandatory happy ending where she says, "If you can paint, I can walk.", his own odyssey during their separation involving this mastery. Perhaps this was an obvious equation in 1941, but its lost on me. I'd like to think this was a reflection of an era when in Germany a few years earlier the disabled were the first to be euthanized & those unable to work were later earned their own insignia equivalent to the yellow star in their death camps, yet Meg Ryan equally cherishes this nobility of self-negation in 1993 as well. Is disability then some metaphor for feelings of worthlessness? Let me know if I missed the point.
Review of Love Affair
