AFFAIR TO REMEMBER, AN - DVD review

I mean, where would "Sleepless in Seattle" be without "An Affair to Remember"? The Empire State Building and all.

"An Affair to Remember" is writer-director Leo McCarey's 1957 remake of his own film, "Love Affair," from some twenty years earlier, remarkably, a picture remade yet another time 1994 with Warren Beatty. Obviously, there's a lot of life in this story line, and we're bound to see it trotted out again in some new guise in the future. Regardless, it works if you're in the mood for romance, but it will seem like a sudsy tearjerker if you're not. I found it worked pretty well. Maybe I was in the mood.

The film stars Deborah Kerr, who at the time was at the height of her popularity, and Cary Grant, who was coming off a minor decline in his popularity but a slump from which he would rebound not just because of this film but because of Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" two years later. "An Affair to Remember" is the kind of film you don't see much anymore, an old-fashioned love story. Although there's a good deal of humor in the film, it's not a romantic-comedy, which we continue to have more than enough of these days. It's just a romance, plain and simple, and an agreeable one.

The story is helped, of course, by the chemistry between Grant and Kerr, but mostly it's Grant who carries the show. He plays Nicky Ferrante, a celebrated playboy who is about to be married to a rich heiress, Lois Clark (Neva Patterson). The part of the notorious Nicky is tailor-made for Grant because Nicky is a charming, handsome, happy-go-luck bachelor, exactly the kind of character Grant had played in virtually every movie he ever made, without once losing his appeal. Here he cracks wise, does his usual double takes, walks and talks as gracefully as ever, and generally makes every woman (in the film and in the audience) swoon and every man envious.

Kerr is not well known to young people today, but she's memorable in this film. She plays a former night club singer, Terry McKay, now engaged to a successful businessman, Kenneth Bradley (Richard Denning). Nicky and Terry meet quite by chance aboard an ocean cruise that each is taking alone across the Atlantic. It's almost love at first sight, despite their both having fiancées. I'm not sure what that says about the faithfulness of either of them or the extent of their previous romances, but like Romeo in the play they both forget their former loves entirely after meeting one another.

As the shipboard romance blossoms, so do the snoops and gossip mongers among the passengers and crew. Everybody knows the famous Nicky Ferrante, so when they see him hanging around with a strange new woman, well, it's news. A stopover in the south of France to visit Nicky's Grandmother Janou (Cathleen Nesbitt) turns out to be the second-best part of the picture. Ms. Nesbitt, a veteran performer, outclasses everybody in the cast by conveying more in a gesture than the others express in a page of dialogue.

Anyway, by the end of the cruise, Nicky and Terry decide to test their love. They make a pact to meet in exactly six months atop the Empire State Building, July 1 at 5 p.m. on the 102nd floor, and if they still love each other, they will get married. For the next six months, he goes back to the painting he used to do before getting caught up in the social swirl, and she goes back to her singing. Ms. Kerr's voice, incidentally, is performed by Marni Nixon, and it's voice that may sound familiar to you. She was the uncredited vocalist behind Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady," Natalie Wood in "West Side Story," and, ironically Deborah Kerr in "The King and I," among others.

But back to our story, where fate intervenes in the best-laid plans. By the time you get to the film's ending, I guarantee a genuine two-hanky affair.

I mentioned that the picture seems old-fashioned today. I mean that in more ways than one. Certainly, it may strike a viewer as a bit outdated in its depiction of two people falling so instantly in love but waiting six months to do anything about it. And then there's that sentimental finish. But more than that, the film just looks old fashioned. Despite an abundance of location shots, most of the movie has the appearance of a Hollywood sound stage. The process shots, for instance, of ocean or harbor or even nighttime sky look obviously contrived. Yet, they are part of the film's glamour; they're what we expect from a Tinsel Town romance, not obvious realism.

Now, I have to tell you that while I enjoyed most of the film, there were several scenes where I wanted to strangle some of the participants. These were the scenes involving kids. First, there's a little boy on the ship who is too precious for words and looks like he knows it. Worse, there are two gratuitous singing sequences involving a whole group of children who mug mercilessly for the camera and generally carry on in so cutesy-poo a manner as to make one wish their parents had practiced stricter birth control. True, Ms. Kerr's character is a singer, but why the filmmakers thought it necessary to surround her with such outrageously mannered and pretentious munchkins I have no idea. Each time they sing, it brings the seriousness, the good humor, and the charisma of the film to a dead halt. Fortunately, it's not often.

Video:
The movie is presented in an anamorphic CinemaScope widescreen aspect ratio measuring approximately 2.13:1 across a normal television. The colors are bright and lifelike, well etched, and rich, if a tad dark at times. Some scenes, like Nicky's grandmother's garden, are stunningly beautiful. There is no sign of added grain and very few conspicuous moiré effects. The only downside to the reproduction is that I couldn't help noticing some of the scenes appeared somewhat distorted, very slightly stretched horizontally, as though they weren't quite being expanded properly by the anamorphic lens. If you can overlook this minor aberration, the transfer is quite realistic.

Audio:
The sound is in two-channel stereo, which should come as a pleasant surprise to those of you thinking that not many films other than super-spectaculars of the fifties came in anything but monaural. Played back in Dolby Pro Logic, the sound has a nice, warm, agreeable presence to it. Expect no wide dynamics, deep bass, or extended highs, though. Despite these limitations, music is especially well tendered, with a limited but welcome front-channel stereo spread. There is no rear-channel activity to speak of, however, although in a film like this one there wouldn't be much information to put back there, anyway. Vocals are a touch pinched and there is some small amount of background noise, but these flaws are barely discernible, and I'm probably just being picky.

Extras:
In their "Studio Classics" line of older films, the people at Fox have been doing a respectable job finding complementary bonus materials of worth. On this disc, for instance, they provide an audio commentary with singer Marni Nixon and film historian Joseph McBride that is highly entertaining in its purely informative way. Then, there's a twenty-four-minute AMC Backstories episode, "An Affair to Remember," that takes us behind the scenes to look at what was really going on during the movie's production. Moreover, we have a one-minute Movietone newsreel, "Shipboard Première," that shows us the film's opening aboard an ocean liner; a still gallery; twenty scene selections; a widescreen theatrical trailer; and three additional trailers for other Fox Classics. English, French, and Spanish are the spoken language choices, with English and Spanish for subtitles. Not a bad roundup.

Parting Thoughts:
"An Affair to Remember" is a film that had I seen it in 1957 when I was in about the seventh grade, I would have gagged. But now that I'm older, the world looks different, and I'm more receptive to this film's type of unabashed schmaltz. It's done me no harm.