Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Remembering the affair, or the night?

I’ve long known there were movies called An Affair to Remember and A Night to Remember, though I’d seen neither of them. I’ve also known one of them is about the sinking of the Titanic and the other involves a meeting at the Empire State Building and gets referenced in Sleepless in Seattle.

I just haven’t known which is which.

Or thought I did, until I actually watched An Affair to Remember on Monday night.

I was quite sure this was the movie with the fated non-meeting at the top of the Empire State, which makes Seattle’s Rita Wilson cry in describing its ending (whose details I started to remember as I was watching it). But then Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr board a cruiseliner and spend the next hour of screen time on it, and I started to doubt myself.

I knew in the back of my mind that it was the actual Titianic that sinks in one of these movies, not some boat bopping about from port to port on the Mediterranean. But the sheer amount of time spent on this boat – it’s over half the movie – started to make me question everything. It was just when Kerr started to reference there being rocky waters ahead, and a bit of a dramatic swell on the score, that I started to think I was watching the Titanic movie. I guess this boat was about to transform into the Titanic and jump back nearly a half century.

Just as I was finally looking it up online, the boat docks in New York and you see the Empire State Building in the background. Then they reference it in the next line of dialogue. Okay then.

I just think it’s funny that the movies have such similar titles and spend so much time on a large boat. Furthering the confusion is that A Night to Remember (July 3, 1958) was released a little less than a year after An Affair to Remember (July 19, 1957).

Anyway, I think I’ll remember now.

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