An Affair To Remember – Love Affair
Leo McCarey’s romantic melodrama An Affair to Remember is well-remembered, partially due to its place in the cinematic pantheon via Sleepless in Seattle. The romantic tribulations of Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr have never found their equal in contemporary romance – it’s the best of 1950s melodrama, full of exotic locales and ending on a scene that doesn’t fail to bring a tear to the eye.
An Affair to Remember is actually a remake of McCarey’s own film Love Affair, which starred Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer as the lovers who meet on board an ocean liner on their way to marry other people. The original film doesn’t pack the same emotional punch, however, mostly due to a lack of chemistry between its leads. It’s pretty much the same story with the same outcome and the same set-pieces.
One became a classic though, and the other did not.