a list of which midcentury romance movies are good & which are bad
some midcentury romance movies are good & some are bad
an affair to remember: bad. cary grant does his best but i just find no reason to believe that he & that little redhead like each other that much. they start hanging out bc they are bored & weak willed & ill behaved & none of their conversation moves them past that imo. her secrecy about her accident makes no fucking sense. the movie is however an incredible advertisement for new look dresses
to have & have not: good. story by hemingway, screenplay by faulkner, directed by john huston. lauren bacall makes her film debut as the ultimate bpd gf. did you know she & bogart fell in love on set here? you can see how…..
sabrina: bad. god i feel terrible saying this bc you know i love bogie & you know i love audrey hepburn but this movie simply is not good. her switch from holden to bogart just doesn’t make any sense. like not that bogart isn’t better than holden but why did she switch if she liked holden better in the first place& why did she switch when she did…….hepburn & bogie just didn’t have chemistry imo, i know people disagree, i think hepburn is a little too cold & prim for bogie bc he also has that cool reserved thing going on, they both need to play opposite somoene w a little more fire, someone who lets their claws show more easily
to catch a thief: good. a woman who has something she knows that men want, can’t trust that any man really loves her, unless she knows he could get it from her without telling her he loves her. i’m talking about jewelry, obviously. cary grant plays a reformed jewel thief; grace kelly plays 2nd generation texas oil money.
indiscreet: bad. a transparent consumer fantasy where ingrid bergman & cary grant behave badly enough to deserve each other.
it happened one night: good. unbelievably fun. clark gable talks so much more naturally than a 50’s male lead, it makes the movie feel weirdly contemporary. the plot is your basic “princess on the run” fantasy. he gives her his clothes so often that it’s almost corny but i’m still moved every time
I love this (and your post on Marty, a movie which makes me weep all the way through for how cute and helpless they both are). I also happen to agree with all of these, except I haven't seen To Have and Have Not. I'll add it to the list!
I think Audrey Hepburn at her romantic best is definitely Roman Holiday. Still one of the best movie endings in history by my estimation. Saw it recently in theaters and I still got chills at the way she looks at Peck when he's waiting in line to meet her at the end. And Peck's silent, echoing, lingering walk out is devastating. They both could act the hell out of a "dignified" role, but they also had so much playfulness in that.
I always tend to like the bickering romances with sharp, biting dialogue. The African Queen is a personal favorite (similar in some ways to Marty, just in terms of them both being broken, hopeless people who find each other super late--only Bogey and Katherine Hepburn are LOUDLY broken where Marty and Clara were so quiet and still), as is The Shop Around the Corner (which also has wonderful secondary characters with beautiful little subplots of their own--frankly I think I prefer their side stories to Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan's).
I think the thing I appreciate about all those movies is that, even though all those characters act like children sometimes, they're actually adults with responsibilities and weight that they're carrying with them from their life journeys. They don't feel constructed out of thin air to be stylish or cool, like Bogey and Hepburn do in Sabrina. Blech.
But I also will never turn down a madcap comedy romance, like Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday. Inject that silliness right into my veins. More movies should have multiple leopards get loose and repeatedly mixed up to facilitate a vapid love story between a lunatic and dinosaur bone collector.
Thanks for the post!
weird, going by the fiction i pegged you more as a fan of the b̶e̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ other hepburn.
(audrey i really loved in My Fair Lady tho; now every time i hear someone saying "the way [film] embraces yet subverts the mpdg trope is revolutionary" im like ಠ_ಠ)