Love Affair
Studio: The Criterion Collection
Apr 18, 2022 Web Exclusive
A cruise ship sails from Europe to New York. The most notable passenger on board is one Mr. Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer), one of France’s most famous playboys and, occasionally, a painter. He’s en route to the States to meet up with his fiancée, a famous heiress. Early into the nine-day trip, he meets—and falls hopelessly for—an American singer named Terry (Irene Dunne), who is also on her way to reconnect with the wealthy fiancé who pays her bills. The attraction is mutual. After a torrid affair, they make a promise as the ship enters port: if they still feel the same way for each other in six months, they’ll meet at the top of the Empire State Building and be married.
Of course, life tosses a huge curveball their way before they can dump their betrotheds and elope.
Of director Leo McCarey’s many beloved classics—this one released the same decade as Duck Soup, Make Way for Tomorrow, and The Awful Truth—Love Affair is one of the ones the filmmaker most preferred himself. (He liked the story so much that he remade it as An Affair to Remember in 1957.) A hit upon its release in 1939, Love Affair earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. While not exactly unavailable in recent decades, the movie languished in a sort of public domain hell, seeing little more than subpar DVD transfers or muddy digital copies disseminated online.
Only the first half of Love Affair occurs during their cruise, and this includes many of the film’s best elements: the forbidden relationship, the smoldering attraction, the witty rejections. (A visit to Michel’s brittle grandmother, played by Maria Ouspenskaya, is an especially tender little intermission to their journey.) The second half, though, can feel a bit wonky. Not only does it feel far too convenient that their original spouses-to-be let the go almost immediately and without quarrel, but a tragic twist—one we learn from the disc’s extra features was included to appease censors—takes the movie in an unexpected direction. When everything that kept them apart in the movie’s first half is wrapped up neatly within five minutes after the midpoint, this event feels almost forced in there to pad out the film’s runtime. But, that’s just me.
Love Affair looks better in Criterion’s Blu-ray edition than any video releases that have come before thanks to the 4K restoration from MOMA and Lobster Films. Included are two silent shorts from McCarey’s early days at Hal Roach Studios, an interview with critic Farran Smith Nehme about the many contributors who could lay some claim to Love Affair’s success, a description of the restoration work from Lobster Films’ Serge Bromberg, and two radio adaptations of the story.
(https://www.criterion.com/films/32533-love-affair)
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