Greatest Romantic Films

Last night TCM showed An Affair To Remember on the big screen on the Far Side, the 1957 remake of the 1939 classic Love Affair . Both were directed by Leo McCarey with the same screenplay. Leo McCarey was one of those Hollywood directors who knew how to play and please the audience. The 1939 version starred Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne and the 1957 version starred Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. The remake has the advantage of the musical score and being in colour. Anyway, if you haven't seen them, I recommend them. The scene at the end of the Grant/Kerr version is one of Basil Fawltie's favourite film scenes and it is such a landmark film that it featured in the background to the more recent Sleepless in Seattle (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan). Other great romantic films? - Included must be: Gone With The Wind (1939); Philadelphia Story (1940); Casablanca (1942); The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) [I once watched that with a female work colleague and, quite out of her usual, cool character, she just burst into a fit of unrestrained sobbing after the line, near the end: "And now you'll never be lonely again". This was one of those rare occasions when I have been relieved to have had a clean spare handkerchief up my sleeve, to give to a damsel in distress.].

Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr are in the above picture from the 1957 film (in which, incidentally, he has far better suits than that dog-garn suit in North By Northwest) that so many rave about.