Watchingwell   

             Curated classic films

Speaking of… Love

     My nomination for the best love story of the classic film era is an adaption of a great novel so it has a head start.  But as we know, Hollywood doesn’t have an unblemished track record in this area, so it could also be a handicap.  Anyway, my choice is Wuthering Heights from 1939.  It fulfills my requirements, totally arbitrary, of what does and does not constitute a great love story.  It is not about a love that is made poignant by suffering and separation due to contrived accidents of Fate, or the blindness of one of the individuals that is only lifted at the last moment of the film.  This lets out Random Harvest, Gone with the Wind, Romeo and Juliet (in all its forms), The Shop Around the Corner, and the one that YOU are thinking about.

     Yes, WH has suffering and separation, but the love story is not defined by this – it actually serves to underline the resilience of the bond between Cathy and Heathcliff. The pair are never out of love, even when absent from each other, even when married to others, while, at the same time they seem to accept that they cannot be together.  All right, it is a fine line I draw, but it’s my party.  The fact is that the inescapable-love-as-obsession story by Emily Bronte was pretty well realized by the screenplay by Ben Hecht and the direction of William Wyler.  But a large part of the credit must go to Laurence Olivier who really ‘got’ Heathcliff, and sold us the tortured soul who was incapable of separating from Cathy’s even when realizing the shallow character of hers.  It took me years to look at Merle Oberon’s performance objectively, after my aunt had poisoned my child’s mind with her criticism of her “cat-like” looks and bad acting. Actually, she does a credible job with a difficult role.  My aunt, whose opinion of Oberon did not prevent her from loving the film, thought Vivien Leigh would have been better in the part.  So, reportedly, did Olivier. But I disagree.  I think I even disagreed when I was a child.  Leigh was too delicate.  Cathy needed to be robust, a child of the moors, a tomboy, who rode horses and scrambled up the rocky outgrowths of Penistone Crag. So, Oberon did OK, except for a little too much emoting in the moments before she dies.  Oh – spoiler alert, I guess.  And, in her most important scene, IMO, in the kitchen with her maid/confidante, when she admits how she is hopelessly bonded to Heathcliff, and suddenly, framed by lightning, declares, “Ellen, sometimes I think I am Heathcliff”, she understands this revelation has to balance all the behavior that otherwise would make her unlikable.  And, although the words are Emily Bronte’s, they are probably the most eloquent expression of love you see on American film before the modern era.  Second to this would be the speech Heathcliff pronounces over the newly-dead Cathy begging her to  haunt him, “only never leave me alone in this abyss”. 

     Speaking of Laurence Olivier, and women novelists who were adapted into decent movies, I must give a nod to the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, directed by  

Robert Z. Leonard, with Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet and Olivier as Mr. Darcy.  I have never seen a bad film of P&P, come to think of it, and although Garson seems a little more mature than some of the other Elizabeths, it works in a different kind of way, because no matter who pronounces the words, they are good words. This is a satisfying romance where the audience knows before the two protagonists that they will end up together, and it is sooo lovely to hear Olivier and Garson speak English.

     Speaking of director, William Wyler, you’ve got to give him credit for recognizing the screen magic that Audrey Hepburn would produce in her first starring role as the errant princess in the 1953 film, Roman Holiday, written by Ian MacLellan Hunter, fronting for the blacklisted, Dalton Trumbo. With Gregory Peck who plays the reporter who tries to capitalize on his luck in finding her and ends up falling in love, as audiences did.  And she falls for him as they spend one glorious day and night in Rome before she tears herself away from him and returns to her important princess duties.  Who doesn’t cry at that ending?

     Breaking away from women novelists, but back to Ben Hecht, who, let’s face it, was a great and prolific American writer, we turn to one of my faves of all categories, Notorious, from 1946, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Starring Ingrid Bergman as a woman who is recruited by the American government to spy on Nazis in South America and Cary Grant as her ‘handler’ who gets emotionally involved and then feels guilty, so he feigns detachment and then feels guilty for that.  Cary Grant plays a more stoical version of his usual self, made even more so by the naturalistic Bergman.  There is great chemistry between them and tension, as only Hitchcock knows how to provide.  The ending, with its revolving shot of their whispered embrace is made more explicit by the touch of realism that Bergman brought to every role.

     Speaking of William Wyler again, a powerful love story is enclosed in the multi-layered The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) between Dana Andrews and Teresa Wright.  The screen play by Robert E. Sherwood from the novel by MacKinlay Kantor is about America’s post-war adjustment, but it is contained in several story lines. The love story of Frederic March and Myrna Loy is poignantly expressed to their daughter, Wright, as they oppose her  relationship with Andrews who is married, unhappily, to Virginia Mayo.  But by the touching wedding ceremony they all attend at the end, we know that true love has won out. Tears are required here also.

    Speaking of Dana Andrews, he becomes obsessively in love with a murder victim in Laura, the 1944 film noir directed by Otto Preminger.  Based on the novel by Vera Caspary, the screen play by Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, and Betty Reinhardt  (with an uncredited Ring Lardner, Jr). displays just the right tone of cynical and witty dialogue. Of course, Laura Hunt, played by Gene Tierney isn’t really dead.  But by the time she shows up in the film, Andrews is already on the verge of losing his professional judgment.  This tension is balanced by Tierney’s calm influence, which, in the end, is no match for obsession.  She falls under his spell. Yes, it is a murder mystery.   But it is a love story, too.

     I have posted a clip and written before about the 1943 film The More the Merrier, directed by George Stevens so I need to remind everyone again what a good love story Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur make of this comedy.  In this case, the comedy takes the edge off the emotional content, so it can’t be a great love story.(My rules.)  But a comedy is useful to take the edge off the shocking (for 1943) theme of an unmarried couple forced to cohabitate by unusual circumstances and fall in love as a result.  A similar (and also shocking for 1934) route to love was taken

by Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in another successful comedy/ romance, It Happened One Night, directed by Frank Capra. This theme is a handy way to speed along the slow process of really getting to know someone, especially someone who initially doesn’t interest you.

     Speaking of which, this is precisely what happens in the 1945 film, Without Love, directed by Harold S. Bucquet and starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in one of their less-famous vehicles. Written by Donald Ogden Stewart and based on the play by Philip Barry (Philadelphia Story, Holiday), the ‘marriage of convenience’ between the two stars is a tender story of how fragile people who want to be emotionally safe are enticed into trying again.  There is a great supporting performance by Lucille Ball that livens up the drama.

     Speaking of a marriage of convenience, this is the plot device in a charming romance from 1944, Come Live with

Me, starring James Stewart and Hedy Lamarr and directed by Clarence Brown. In a seemingly timeless theme, Hedy is an immigrant facing deportation, but in those days, you could stay if you were married to a citizen for love and not for avoiding deportation.  So, when Hedy meets struggling writer, James Stewart, she proposes a strictly business arrangement, offering to help him financially, which she can do with the help of her wealthy, but married boyfriend.  However, the lovely Lamarr gives a convincing performance of a sophisticated woman who comes to appreciate the honest relationship with Stewart more than she had anticipated.

Love and chocolate to you.