An Affair to Remember (1957)

The later record

Wikipedia’s entry on the film lists adaptations abroad, among them Bheegi Raat (1965) in India and İlk Aşk (1960) in Turkey. Warren Beatty and Annette Bening starred in a 1994 remake that went back to the title Love Affair. Katharine Hepburn, in her last screen appearance, played the hero’s aunt, a part that replaces the grandmother. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle (1993), which took part of its inspiration from the film, its ending above all, and uses clips and the theme song.

Later judgments remain mixed. Grant’s biographer Richard Schickel counts it among the defining romances of its period, while remarking that Grant did not fully rise above its “gushing sentimentality.” Left off the AFI Top 100, it appeared on the 1998 list of the best American films not included there, drawn up by the Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum. The American Film Institute ranked it fifth on its 100 Passions list. Metacritic gives it 71 out of 100 from 14 critics, and Rotten Tomatoes counts 65% of 34 reviews as positive.

The reviews

Two notices measured the picture against the 1939 original and reached opposite verdicts. The Philadelphia Inquirer recalled weeping over Dunne and Boyer 18 years before and called the new picture an “interminably extended version” of the original. Harrison’s Reports judged it “more enchanting and delightful than the original” and said the closing scenes could bring viewers to tears.

The Monthly Film Bulletin, in a generally positive notice, described “a lush slice of Hollywood romanticism” that follows the conventions of glossy magazine fiction. That reviewer also credited the script with “cutting rather deeper” and praised the brisk development of the relationship between the two leads. The New Yorker’s John McCarten found the actors “tolerable” and the film “awfully maudlin.” Variety took the other side, calling the romance “never maudlin” and “wholly believable,” and predicting “an ideal women’s picture.”

The Washington Post’s Richard L. Coe wrote that amusing early reels turn “unbelievably foolish.” Crowther, in The New York Times, reached the same conclusion at greater length, allowing the early scenes “plenty of humorous conversation” and then objecting to the plot that follows. He called Terry’s silence about her accident “absurd,” the couple’s pact “ridiculously childish,” and Nickie’s slowness in grasping the truth “just too thick.”

What the trade papers reported

An NBC press release dated March 13, 1958, previewed the 30th Academy Awards broadcast of March 26, on which Vic Damone was to sing the nominated song. NBC’s rundown of the program lists the film among the nominees for music scoring, for Milton Krasner’s cinematography, and for best song, the last credited to McCarey, Harold Adamson and Harry Warren. The broadcast was also to include a fashion show with stars as models. Dana Wynter was to wear a gown by Charles Le Maire from the film, in a lineup that also showed costumes from Funny Face and Pal Joey. Robert Ryan and Wendell Corey were to serve as commentators.

A Canadian Film Weekly item of May 1, 1957, reported that Jerry Wald, who had recently set up his own independent company, would make 18 films for 20th-Fox. The paper named An Affair to Remember among seven that it said should be shooting before 1957 was out, all of them in CinemaScope. It listed this title in De Luxe Color, with Grant and Kerr starring and McCarey directing. The same list carried Kiss Them for Me, with Grant and Jayne Mansfield under Stanley Donen. Wikipedia’s entry on the film gives April 1957 as the end of a shoot that began in February, and the May item does not say whether shooting had finished.

The 1958 Films Incorporated catalog supplement offered the picture on 16mm in its wide-screen section, for which a special lens was required, in color at 114 minutes. Its copy described “a charming playboy-artist” and “a lovely ex-night club singer” who decide to test their love by waiting six months. The same section listed Kerr in The King and I and Tea and Sympathy, Grant in Kiss Them for Me, and Ava Gardner in The Sun Also Rises.

The making of the film, in later accounts

Avon Books issued a paperback novelization before the release under the byline Owen Aherne, a pseudonym of the novelist R.V. Cassill. Competing recordings of the song came from Machito on Tico and Carmen Cavallaro on Decca, among others. Marni Nixon dubbed Kerr’s singing, and Damone sang the theme over the opening credits.

McCarey reused the screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart and Delmer Daves, and the remake follows the 1939 film closely, scene by scene. Stewart went uncredited because he had been blacklisted. Wikipedia’s entry on the film says Grant was reportedly grumpy during the shoot because hypnotherapy with his wife had turned him against smoking, and that he had an operation during production for a forehead lump left by a childhood injury. The entry on Grant dates his quitting through hypnotherapy to the early 1950s, so the two entries do not line up on the timing.

The entry on the film reports that plans for a remake were first announced in 1952, with Arlene Dahl and Fernando Lamas attached. It traces Grant’s interest to The Awful Truth, where he first worked with McCarey and at first disliked the director’s improvising. By this account he came to wish he had been in Love Affair, often visited its set, and years later talked McCarey into making it again with himself in the Boyer part. Wikipedia’s entry on Grant tells the earlier friction from the other side, saying McCarey reportedly disliked Grant for mimicking his mannerisms in the film, yet encouraged him to improvise. McCarey later complained that Hollywood pictures were hunting for “a trick way” to declare love, which he called “the oldest and noblest emotion.”