Charles Boyer

Love Affair

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Terry and Michel at the ship's rail

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 … Read more

The Earrings of Madame de…

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The general and his wife in all their finery

Light-hearted, ironic, passionate, frivolous, lush, beautifully made and full of little jokes, The Earrings of Madame de… is the sort of self-consciously filmic film that film-makers love but audiences are less enthusiastic about. It was a favourite of Kubrick. Douglas Sirk described it as perfect. When it got its Criterion Collection release Paul Thomas Anderson did the spoken introduction. New York Observer critic Andrew Yarris referred to it as the Greatest Film of All Time. Even if you don’t rate it quite so highly, it’s undeniably exquisitely made. This was director Max Ophüls back in Europe after a sojourn in Hollywood, and he’s definitely off the leash. His final four European films – La … Read more

Liliom

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Liliom at the carnival

“I almost like Liliom best of all,” Fritz Lang said in 1974 about the film he’d directed 40 years earlier. This from a director who invented whole genres (like the spy thriller), directed massive epics (Metropolis) and went on to dominate the crime drama with films like The Big Heat. Lang’s entirely atypical film about the poetic side of wife-beating is quite a surprise. It is a film full of surprises though. The story for one – sweet young Julie falls for rapscallion carnival barker Liliom, a man who loves her but is violent, lazy, feckless and eventually meets an ugly end after taking part in a heist. He then ascends to purgatory, … Read more