An Affair To Remember-50th Anniversary (1957)

Ultimate DVD
5 stars out of 5 -- "This is a classic, combining romance, drama, comedy and style....A love story, but one that touches the heart..." 04/01/2008 p.88

DVD Town 8 of 10
I mean, where would "Sleepless in Seattle" be without "An Affair to Remember"? The Empire State Building and all..."An Affair to Remember" is writer-director Leo McCarey's 1957 remake of his own film, "Love Affair," from some twenty years earlier, remarkably, a picture remade yet another time 1994 with Warren Beatty. Obviously, there's a lot of life in this story line, and we're bound to see it trotted out again in some new guise in the future. Regardless, it works if you're in the mood for romance, but it will seem like a sudsy tearjerker if you're not. I found it worked pretty well. Maybe I was in the mood..."An Affair to Remember" is a film that had I seen it in 1957 when I was in about the seventh grade, I would have gagged. But now that I'm older, the world looks different, and I'm more receptive to this film's type of unabashed schmaltz. It's done me no harm. - John J. Puccio
 
The Onion A.V. Club 8 of 10
In 1957, director Leo McCarey was on the last legs of his storied career. First known as a comic director who introduced Laurel to Hardy and clowned with the Marx brothers, then as a maker of upstanding religious family fare like Going My Way and The Bells Of St. Mary's, McCarey hit his apex with 1937's The Awful Truth, one of the best screwball comedies ever made. His 1939 follow-up Love Affair, starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, scored six Oscar nominations. But in the '50s, with his light touch foundering under the weight of a new pro-America, anti-communist ideology--he was a friendly witness in the HUAC hearings on the Red menace in Hollywood--he accepted the assignment to direct an update of Love Affair, this time in breathtaking Cinemascope and glorious Technicolor...The result of the unusual undertaking (directors who've remade their own films can be counted on one hand) was An Affair To Remember, a stately romance distinguished by two appealing leads, Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Grant plays a European gadabout headed to New York for a celebrity wedding to his heiress fiancee, and Kerr is a nightclub singer returning to her sugar daddy...Nobody would mistake An Affair To Remember for a master class in cinema. McCarey's widescreen technique is utilitarian, and the third act, in which the lovers are kept apart mostly by Kerr's overactive conscience, spends a lot of time spinning its wheels. Yet the principals are in such fine form, underplaying against their stagy backdrops, and the tragic turn of the plot is so gripping, that the movie succeeds in spite of its white-elephant pedigree. In particular, the famous final scene remains an edge-of-the seat experience, as Grant paces around the immobile Kerr, talking in riddles about who did and didn't show up at the Empire State Building that fateful day. - Donna Bowman
 
DVD Talk 9 of 10
This one is for the saps...Though, I must say, I think the older I get, the more I like it. I don't know if I am gathering a greater capacity for cheesy emotion instead of wisdom as I trundle on into the autumn of my years, but it's possible...Immortalized as the ultimate chick flick in Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle, this 1957 movie from writer/director Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth) is apparently not supposed to appeal to members of my gender, but frankly, boys could learn an awful lot from Cary Grant's masculine example in this film. Grant plays Nickie Ferrante, last of the famous international playboys. When Nickie boards a transatlantic cruise to meet his fiance (Neva Patterson) in New York, it makes the news programs around the world. Could the notorious gadabout really be settling down? Certainly his future wife's multimillion-dollar fortune is enticement even if love is not...On the trip, Nickie meets Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr), a former nightclub singer also sailing to meet her fiance (Richard Denning). Terry is devoted to the man who took her out of smoky bars in order to make her a proper woman, and so she easily rebuffs Nickie's charms. It's a new experience for him, and the lothario is flummoxed. The chemistry that exists between these two is one unlike anything they've felt before, and no matter how much they try to pull apart, they always end up right back together. After a sidetrip to meet Nickie's adoring grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt) during a port stop, the two can't deny it any longer. They also can't deny that they are in a sticky situation as far as their mutual engagements, so they make a plan to take six months to disengage...The movie is a classic romance, with a convincing relationship between two characters played with considerable charm by Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Though it is extremely melodramatic, An Affair to Remember comes by its sentiments honestly. The laughs are real, and so are the tears. - Jamie S. Rich