The various remakes of Love Affair studied this 1939 original closely and learned the right lessons. The acting must be of a high order but more than that the leads must have chemistry. The story itself is relatively unimportant. It’s a case of two people meeting, falling in love before they know it and then fate and human frailty throwing impediments to happiness in their way. Standard stuff, really.
The remakes are 1957’s An Affair to Remember, which pitted Cary Grant against Deborah Kerr. 1994’s Love Affair, with Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. And, a remake of sorts, Sleepless in Seattle, which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan and was in dialogue with An Affair to Remember, that scene atop the Empire State Building in particular.
This is the motherlode. If you like any of those other films, you will like this. Charles Boyer plays world-famous playboy Michel, Irene Dunne nightclub singer Terry. They meet at sea on a transatlantic liner and because sea journeys are irksome Michel and Irene flirt with each other to pass the time. And somewhere between the coupes of pink champagne and sparkling cut and thrust, Terry and Michel realise they are edging into serious emotional territory and so they back off. It’s too late – the ship stops off at Madeira and Michel takes Terry to meet his grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya), who acts as a romantic catalyst on both parties. As if a fairy wand has been waved, both are entirely smitten.
Neither knows what to do with these new emotions, nor with the fact that he’s sailing to New York to get married and she’s supposed to be going home to a loyal boyfriend. So they agree to meet on the top of the Empire State Building in six months to see if they still feel the same way. But fate has other plans for the couple.
It’s all beautifully done, with restraint and elegance. Take the love scene at Michel’s grandmother’s, where Terry and Michel don’t kiss each other passionately to signify the seriousness of what’s happened to them. Instead they hold hands, but tightly, as if they’ve found something precious and now don’t want to let it go.
It’s all like this, little touches all the way through. Boyer is, of course, made for roles like this – he’s French, after all, and brings an old-world elegance and savoir faire to the role. Dunne is probably the surprise. With a girl-next-door quality that belied her talent, she was an actress of great versatility, at this point having already been a musical star in films like Showboat, and a queen of screwball comedy in Theodora Goes Wild. Here, she amps up the pathos and proves she’s good at that too.
Romances are hard to do. You can’t rely on jokes or boo scares, like you can in comedy and horror, and the plot can only go in one of two ways – either the impediments to happiness are overcome or they’re not. It’s vital that we identify with the characters and start to feel protective of them. Which is a stretch in the case of Terry and Michel, who are both big, grown-up types who’ve been around the block a bit. That’s why they were flirting with each other in the first place, after all – because they can handle this sort of stuff. Except they can’t.
Amazingly, up until recently the only way to see this film was on copies taken from a 16mm print. They were terrible. And so are a lot of the DVD versions out there. Go for the Criterion Collection version if you want a hard copy (linked to below). Restored to 4K from an original nitrate print, it’s still a touch soft but the contrast is good and the picture is clear.
So good they made it twice, three times, and then sort of once again, here it’s Leo McCarey demonstrating how elegant a 1930s Hollywood film was. He’d direct An Affair to Remember too. Clearly he fell in love all over again.
Love Affair – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
