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 recovering courtesans into saints during the second half, McCarey’s shipload of phooey all but sinks at home port.

As indulging digression about convergence, there’s this: Grant was out of sorts by 1956 over his third marriage—to erudite Betsy Drake—because he had fallen in love with Sophia Loren while filming The Pride and the Passion in Spain and soon to follow, especially over the reactions to his poor performance in the epic, beginning to doubt himself as actor. He had known Drake was taking LSD, apparently administered by a therapist, and raving about its positive affects, as she too worried that their marriage was about to end. (And she did recommend to him its usage.) Though the timeline of actual first ingestions seem to have started around 1958, the dates of intakes and under what circumstances might not have been “remembered” correctly, avoiding moral instead of legal issues (LSD and other drugs of similar ilk were not then federally controlled substances) and to thwart any negative publicity fallout. Given that Grant filmed three movies basically back to back—Affair (2/57 to 4/57), the awful Kiss Them for Me (4/57 to 6/67) and the disbelieving Houseboat (8/57 to 10/57) with Loren again being pressured to marry him, the usage of LSD could have been quietly underway, supposedly on weekends. (Following these movies to roughly 1962, he publicly claimed to have had 100 therapist-administered LSD treatments.) If no detection of drugs in his performance in Affair, there is palpable enervation about him fortifying his trademark style—he gives somnambulism a refreshed gloss. The other intent for taking LSD was to bring something personal on film, to be more than the nothing he felt inside, never so clear 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 of ladies of the screen, like some of his real wives, would bid for Grant’s services propelled by the everlasting Coppertone image; what we don’t buy is 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 singing those scratching-against-the-blackboard numbers “He Knows You Inside” and “Tomorrow Land.” Yet there’s a favored tilt from the start—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, or when stretched out on a couch about to receive Janou’s lace shawl, she’s the perfect 1950s Xmas present for Grant and for the sucker audience which still responds with the water works seventy years later. As Kerr’s credit dispenser, Richard Denning never more handsome than in Color by Deluxe 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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