Love Affair
About Love Affair
Michel Marnet, a French painter engaged to heiress Lois Clarke, meets nightclub singer Terry McKay on an Atlantic liner. She is engaged to Kenneth Bradley. At Madeira they visit his grandmother Janou, who wants him to settle down. Before New York they agree to meet in six months on top of the Empire State Building, if he can earn a living and she still wants him. On that day a car hits Terry. She may not walk again and does not send word. He waits until the deck closes. She later teaches music at an orphanage. On Christmas Eve they meet at a theater and she hides the injury. The next day he comes to her rooms, sees the truth, and stays.
Cast & crew
More about Love Affair
Leo McCarey produced and directed from a story he wrote with Mildred Cram. Delmer Daves and Donald Ogden Stewart did the screenplay. The Production Code office rejected an earlier draft for treating an affair too kindly. The story was pulled out of an 1850s setting about a French diplomat after the French embassy objected. Rewrites pushed the cost from about $800,000 to $860,000. It opened at Radio City Music Hall on March 16, 1939.
Themes
Making
Shooting ran in the fall of 1938. Janou's Madeira visit is the scene that turns the flirtation into a promise. Michel, whose paintings will not sell, takes billboard work so he can keep the date.
Reviews
The New York Times wrote that Boyer and Dunne matched every change in the script, light one minute and sober the next. Pare Lorentz called the picture a mood rather than a story, kept alive by McCarey's interpolations.
Look
Rudolph Maté photographed the liner, the Madeira stop, and the New York rooms.
Music
Roy Webb wrote the score. Buddy DeSylva wrote "Wishing," music and lyrics, which Dunne sings. The other performed songs are "Sing My Heart" and "Plaisir d'amour."
Notes
- The six Oscar nominations were Best Picture, Best Actress (Irene Dunne), Best Supporting Actress (Maria Ouspenskaya), Original Story (McCarey and Cram), Art Direction (Van Nest Polglase and Alfred Herman), and Song ("Wishing," Buddy DeSylva).
- Dunne picked "Wishing" as the signature song. She also sings "Sing My Heart" in a Philadelphia club and "Plaisir d'amour" at Janou's.
- Robert Mitchell's Boys Choir dubbed the orphans.
- Edward Dmytryk and George Hively edited. Rudolph Maté photographed.
- A champagne company used the shipboard drinking to push pink champagne, and sales of it rose.
- McCarey remade the story in 1957 as An Affair to Remember.
Scenes
- On the liner they agree to dine apart because of his reputation, and keep meeting anyway.
- Janou, in Madeira, takes to Terry and tells Michel to settle.
- The proposal goes out as a date: six months, the top of the Empire State Building.
- He waits on the deck until closing. She is in a hospital after the crash.
- On Christmas Day he finds her with the children and learns why she never came.
Influenced by
- Leo McCarey and Mildred Cram's original story
Influenced
- An Affair to Remember (1957)
Also available
- Internet Archive (LoveAffair)
- Wikimedia Commons (Love Affair (1939) by Leo McCarey.webm)
