Rent An Affair to Remember (1957)

Of the Seasons and the Sea - An Affair to Remember review by CH

When did cigarette cases pass from general view? This had occurred to me while reading again The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), whose plot turns around an inscribed one. Such an item – also engraved – surfaces in An Affair to Remember (1957) which finds almost all the men sporting hats (except for one who declares, “I'm so stupid, I ain't even ignorant!”). Come Kennedy, hats would be gone and perhaps cigarette cases before them.

The plot is familiar, partly because it is a re-make of Love Affair (1939) which was also directed and written by Leo McCarey, a man with an undoubted sentimental side but let us not forget that he made that masterpiece of mayhem Duck Soup; that familiarity is also resonant because it was to inspire that run of Nineties romantic comedies such as Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail. The plot is a variant upon such shipboard romances as the one which made Anything Goes steam ahead. Aboard a liner – the Constitution - both Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, he a playboy painter, she a singer, are engaged to well-heeled others who are busy in America with their business dealings. Between Europe and New York, there is a dalliance (“let's get some air” “I'll show you the rudder” sounds faintly indecent), which is stoked by a halt on the Riviera, where Deborah Kerr accompanies Grant on a visit to his grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt).

This is a protracted scene which, although elegantly done, goes on a bit (as does the film itself at close on two hours). And, as it is, with Grant then fifty-three, Cathleen Nesbitt should have been at least a hundred. No matter, here is a woman who hugs Grant and, a leap across time, may have recalled while doing so that she once had in her arms another handsome man, Rupert Brooke: she was one of his various girlfriends (her memoir is coy about their involvement).

There are, amidst the furs and cuff-links, enough sharp lines to alleviate the inevitable sentimentality. “My mother told me never to enter a man's room in months ending with an r.” And later there is the eternal wisdom of “never is a frightening word”.

Some notches beneath Ninotchka, that unsurpassable romantic comedy, here – complete with Christmas scenes – is grand entertainment which reminds us that should anybody utter the greeting “top of the morning!”, the correct reply is, “and the rest of the day to you!”