An Affair to Remember

GIGOLO, GIGOLETTE

An Affair to Remember starts out as a shipboard comedy and turns into a gooey Catholic morality lesson about the dangers of love at first port of call during the Eisenhower era. Cary Grant’s a failed artist-international playboy hawked by the press as a “big dame hunter” engaged to a rich bitch, making his stature not much more than a gigolo; Deborah Kerr pretends to be a swanky nightclub chanteuse but, given her furs, jewelry and Park Avenue penthouse are paid for by her betrothed, she’s not much more than a gigolette. They meet on a luxury liner and of course they’re smitten by each other’s beauty and charm and therefore tempted into the assumed safety net of unavailability. Nothing in Grant’s routine convinces Kerr he’s worth dumping her billpayer for—until he takes her to visit his grandmother at Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. Grannie is the incomparably nauseous Cathleen Nesbitt as initial SOS: Suddenly Grant possesses everything Kerr wants, even though he’s got zilch. And he’s overwhelmed too—Kerr’s the dream girl with a singing voice like Marni Nixon’s. Why, she even sings in French and gives old granny an impromptu heart-tugging hug! Though Nesbitt’s moments tax to the max, and the engineered schmaltz later on is like a super-soaked Depend, it’s the Kerr & Grant on-ship “affair” that endangers our suspension of disbelief. McCarey’s Catholicism navigates around the potential “whose cabin do we sneak into?” notoriety by having Grant return a borrowed book from Kerr’s quarters that might as well be The Official Hays Morality Guide. (He also avoids how Grant replenishes his bank account; where did the money come from to book two additional voyages on the S.S. Constitution?) Having turned these two recovering courtesans into saints during the second half, McCarey’s shipload of phooey all but sinks at home port.

As matter of fact Grant was beginning to take LSD at around the time of filming Affair, initiated by his then-wife, the erudite Betsy Drake, who worried their marriage was in trouble when he fell for Sophia Loren while making The Pride and the Passion and pressing her to agree to marry him during the shoot of Houseboat. (Following the movies to roughly 1962, he claimed to have had 100 therapist-administered LSD treatments,) If no detection of drugs in his performance in Affair, there is a palpable enervation about him seeming to fortify his trademark style—he gives somnambulism a coat of crackerjack gloss. Another intent for using LSD was to bring out something personal on film, to be more than the nothing he felt inside, never so apparent than in The Pride and the Passion. More than once he would say, “I was an utter fake, a know-it-all who knew very little.” (Hitchcock would tell him the awful truth without LSD: “The best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well.”) We’re accepting that ladies of the screen, like some of his real wives, would bid for his services propelled by the everlasting Coppertone image; we don’t buy there’s any newfound credibility he’s an artist in search for purpose. In too many scenes in Affair he’s trapped in maudlin bits no actor could play without gagging, so he receives some sympathy for believing he needed a little help from head trips to get through his character’s bullshit quest for “art,” representing less the voyage to maturity and more the worst of McCarey’s Left Bank off-season tourist religiosity. Kerr can’t redeem her sap-sucking moments, either—especially the pre-Sound of Music ones with the rainbow coalition kids singing those scratching-against-the-blackboard numbers “He Knows You Inside” and “Tomorrow Land.” Yet there’s the winning tilt—she’s never looked more comely: decked out in designer clothes, draped in stoles, capped by soft red hair, the exemplar of comme il faut even in a wheelchair, she’s the perfect 1950s Xmas present for Grant and for the sucker audience, still producing the water works seventy years later. With Richard Denning as Kerr’s credit dispenser, and Neva Patterson, who’s Grant’s intended early on, skillfully delivering dumbfounded reactions during Robert Q. Lewis’s TV interview.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com