Love Affair with Boyer and Dunne

      After his memorable performance as Pepe le Moko in Algiers (1939), Charles Boyer in the same year starred opposite Irene Dunne in Love Affair, a romantic comedy directed by Leo McCarey, whose credits include famous funny movies like Duck Soup (1933) and The Awful Truth (1937).  Love Affair, as insubstantial as it is compared to McCarey's best known films (he also directed Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's), nonetheless has its two stars' interpersonal chemistry lending weight to a light though melodramatic love story about a transatlantic crossing lasting eight and a half days, during which a professional woman, Terry McKay, falls in love with Michel Marnay, a playboy who's never worked before.

     He's dabbled in painting but never sold anything.  Later in the film, in New York, he sells lots of paintings.  Of course, this is how unknown artists succeed in life--selling out all but one painting, held onto for sentimental reasons.  That painting, of the woman, Terry, who left him hanging at their prearranged meeting place to resume their relationship, represents for him a lost hope.  She later tries to buy the painting (for sentimental reasons), but is given it by the art dealer who probably takes pity on her--she's in a wheelchair.

     Michel suggests, once they've arrived in New York, to wait six months before resuming their shipboard romance.  He reasons that he needs to establish himself, making himself worthy of her, for he's been a wastrel most of his life and he needs time to disentangle himself from his girlfriend, Lois Clarke (Astrid Allwyn), a rich woman whose personality can be categorized as rich girl whose daddy never said no to her.

     He also wants to make his own living.  He gets a job painting billboards.  The sight of a cheerful Charles Boyer standing on the ledge at a billboard's base, wearing overalls, painting the calf of some female figure adorning a cigarette ad, is hardly believable.  Imagine Cary Grant working as a butcher; it doesn't make sense.

     The fateful would-be meeting in question, 5:00 pm on July 1 on the 102nd story of the Empire State Building, the observation deck, never takes place.  Michel shows up, eyeing eagerly every opening of the elevator doors, at last giving up that evening during a thunderstorm.

     He paints a portrait of Terry from memory, the one she's given by the art dealer.  He even runs into her several months later in a theater after the play's over with.  By this time, the audience, if not Michel, knows why she failed to meet with him in the skyscraper.  On her way to the meeting she was hit by a car, her legs don't work but there's hope she'll walk again.  Her physical therapy isn't dealt with at all so it's hard to know the severity of her injury.  Is it serious nerve damage?  Is she paralyzed from the waist down? 

     Michel looks her up in the phone book, months of wondering driving him nuts, I assume.  On her divan, legs covered, Terry doesn't tell him why she missed the five o'clock rendezvous all those months ago.  He reverses his story, saying how interesting it was that she showed up but he didn't.  They speak in their opposite roles pertaining to the situation.  He soon sees the portrait he painted, makes the connection, melts before lovely modest Terry.  He gives her his mother's shawl, an item admired by Terry in Madeira during a transatlantic stop.  The mother (Maria Ouspenskaya), a dying widow, wants nothing more than for her only son to marry a decent woman and get serious about life.

     She dies before seeing this happen, but if you make it to the end of the film you'll see Michel and Terry smiling at each other and embracing, Michel now in the know about his lover's physical condition.  If he's willing to paint signs, he's presumably also willing to take care of an invalid, and anyway, the movie's happy ending suggests she'll walk soon after the credits roll.  

     About the car accident: In a hurry to make her meeting, delayed at a clothing store, Terry takes a cab to the Empire State Building.  As she pays him, the cabbie asks her, "What's the rush?"  She makes some small talk explanation and hurries off.  We hear screeching rubber, gasps of startled witnesses, the movie's tone shifts from light comedy with occasional serious tones to Terry lying on her back in a hospital, blaming herself for pausing in an intersection to look up at the skyscraper where she's supposed to meet the love of her life after not seeing him for six months.

     She later repeats this self-blame, but she never blames the cabbie.  In reality, it's his fault because he asks the stupidest fucking question a person can ask anyone: "What's the rush?"

     This delays her for about eight seconds, long enough for the car that hits her in the intersection to move farther along the street where it will impact her body.  

     As the eponymous character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Robert Mitchum says, "Never ask a man why he's in a hurry."  A wise line for anyone to contemplate, it gets at the idea of the occasionally thoughtless human interactions occurring in our lives; how a moment's delay might affect an outcome, how someone's breezy politeness might cause a chain reaction of problematic events.  I wanted to punch that cabbie in the face.

     Love Affair has some good qualities, mainly in the interactions between Boyer and Dunne, but they're separated from each other for about half the film.  Still, their performances, especially when they're on screen together, help hold the film together.  We know they'll hook up before the end.  The sad parts amidst the comedy (carried out mostly by supporting players and extras, including a group of insufferable cheerful orphans--music students of Terry's after her accident) drag the plot at times.  A movie shifting from a light romantic comedy to melodrama halfway through never sits well with me.  Made For Each Other (1938), with Carole Lombard and James Stewart, exhibits the same mistake: a funny screwball comedy lapsing into melodrama during the last reel.  The two genres don't go together, hence, Love Affair is a hit and miss entertainment with two great movie stars.

Vic Neptune