An Affair to Remember

We have this film to thank for Cary Grant’s performance in North By Northwest. After a couple of flops, including the big-budget failure, The Pride and the Passion, Grant was ready to retire from the movies. Dealing with the colossal ego of his co-star in that picture, Frank Sinatra, had drained him. Charles Higham and Roy Moseley described Sinatra’s behavior on the set of The Pride and the Passion in their biography of Grant:

Sinatra was at his worst at the time, his nervous, volatile temperament annoying to everyone. He insisted on calling Cary “Mother Cary”; he refused to drive in a chauffeured Mercedes but insisted that his Thunderbird be flown in from Hollywood; he threatened to urinate on Kramer if the director would not get him back to his hotel before midnight . . .

As if putting up with Old Blue Eyes wasn’t bad enough, Grant had fallen in love with his other co-star, Sophia Loren. The affair was quite passionate, and Loren has admitted that she was torn over whether to accept Grant’s proposal of marriage when filming ended, but she ultimately turned him down and went back to her lover, Italian director Carlo Ponti. Grant was devastated.

Then came the opportunity to make An Affair to Remember (1957), a remake (by the director of the original) of a 1930s romantic drama of thwarted love, with a happy ending. Grant plays a charming, witty — and irresistible — bachelor, a role he had perfected. One last fling in Europe, and he’s ready to settle down with a New York heiress, to the dismay of women all over the world. Then he meets Deborah Kerr on the ship, and has second thoughts.

Kerr is returning to her sugar daddy (well, that’s how we’d describe her relationship with the wealthy man who has set her up in a swank apartment, to which he has a key, and promised to advance her singing career; fifties movies could be naughty, in an oblique way). Of course, she is smitten, and it’s cute to watch the two of them as they attempt to avoid the inevitable.

What makes the picture memorable, however, is not the shipboard romance. It’s Grant’s bitterness when Kerr fails to show up for the rendez-vous they’d planned in six months’ time. It’s not her fault, of course. The poor thing was hit by a car on her way to meeting him on the top of the Empire State Building and lost the use of her legs, but Grant doesn’t know that. Bitter, he’s even more attractive than he was when he was debonair. Maybe not as appealing as when he thought Ingrid Bergman was relishing her romance with Claude Rains in Notorious, but well worth watching.

Grant got his mojo back with An Affair to Remember. The boost kept him going through several forgettable films (including Houseboat, when he was reunited with Sophia Loren) and one keeper: North by Northwest.