1001 Flicks

Regularly updated blog charting the most important films of the last 104 years.

Friday, November 21, 2008

317. An Affair To Remmember (1957)


















Directed By Leo McCarey

Synopsis

Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr are both going to get married in the near future to other people. While on a boat they fall in love with each other. They decide to meet in six months at the top of the Empire State Building if they still feel the same way and want to get married to each other. Well Deborah Kerr on her way to him has a close encounter of the being run over and paralysed kind, while he is up there thinking he is getting the dump of a lifetime. She goes one to teach annoying children how to sing, and he eventually finds out she is paralysed and they get together again.

Review

I know a lot of people love this film... I think it's a bit crap. On paper it shouldn't be... Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr and Leo McCarey are all good at their jobs, heck even great. Then you read the script... and you think this is a bit silly... then you get to the second half and you go: "Two fucking singing numbers with children? What the fuck is going on here?"

It is all too silly and heavy handed to appeal to people who like their cinema to be even slightly subtle. I am known to cry in loads of films, I can't even count how many films in this list have made me cry... at the end of this I just laughed my head off.

What is it with the two children singing numbers? They just sound out of place, they do nothing to advance the story or to flesh out any characters, as the children as completely inconsequential and have not existence outside those numbers... we would have been just as well served by just having established that Kerr finds her work with children rewarding and the children like her... the singing was perfectly excusable. Oh well... didn't like it. Oh and Cary Grant is a shit painter.

Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film is considered one of the most romantic of all time, according to the American Film Institute. The movie was a remake of McCarey's 1939 film Love Affair, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer. An Affair to Remember was almost identical to Love Affair on a scene to scene basis. McCarey used the same screenplay as the original film, which was penned by Delmer Daves and Donald Ogden Stewart.

Contributing to the success of the 1957 film is its theme song "An Affair to Remember (Our Love Affair)' composed by Harry Warren with lyrics by Leo McCarey and Harold Adamson. The song is sung by Vic Damone during the opening credits and then sung later by Deborah Kerr's character, a nightclub singer. Kerr's singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon, who also dubbed for Kerr in the film The King and I.

Deborah Kerr sings!... well, she's being dubbed:



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