Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember

Based on Leo McCarey’s own 1939 film, Love Affair, Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember follows Cary Grant’s Nickie Ferrante and Deborah Kerr’s Terry McKay as they meet and fall in love on a cruise ship – with the couple’s happiness threatened by their relationships with other people. Filmmaker McCarey, working from a script cowritten with Delmer Daves, has infused Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember with an almost excessively deliberate pace that remains problematic from start to finish, as the viewer’s efforts at connecting to the material or the characters are consistently thwarted by the lackadaisical, momentum-free narrative. It’s just as clear, however, that the movie benefits substantially from Grant and Kerr’s thoroughly charismatic work, with the actors’ palpable chemistry together compensating, up to a certain point, for the less-than-engrossing atmosphere. The film’s watchable vibe persists until the two central characters are separated at around the halfway mark, as McCarey subsequently devotes the lion’s share of screentime to a series of irrelevant, time-wasting interludes – including a series of interminable musical numbers with Terry’s young students. It doesn’t help, either, that Terry’s reason for steering clear of Nickie is, to put it mildly, difficult to swallow, and although the movie picks up for a seriously affecting finish, Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember has long-since established itself as an overlong and, ultimately, ineffective romantic drama.

** out of ****