Watching my Valentine's movie before Valentine's Day this year

There's being committed to watching movies at thematically appropriate times and then there is just being stupid.

Last year on Valentine's Day, I tried to convince my wife to watch Roman Holiday, the second movie in my monthly Audient Classics series, with me. She wasn't interested, so I watched it by myself.

Stupid, I told you.

As it turns out, my wife would have been interested in something else -- if you follow me -- only I didn't read the room correctly. We had not had a special dinner and though we did have a cocktail while starting our latest puzzle, it seemed to me that Valentine's Day was effectively being treated like any other night.

I won't make that mistake again, and to prove it, I watched the overtly romantic classic film on February 13th this year.

That film was Love Affair, a title I had heard before, but only got on my radar as something to watch because I saw it pop up on Kanopy the other day. One of my unofficial benchmarks for it being the new movie year -- yes, I'm still talking about "new and old movie years" -- is that I need to watch something truly classic, and a film released in 1939 seemed to fit the bill. 

Only as I started watching, and not until around the midway mark, did I realize Leo McCarey's movie has the same plot as An Affair to Remember -- which is in fact a remake of Love Affair, released 18 years later. Interestingly, both films are directed by McCarey. It's like when Alfred Hitchcock remade his own The Man Who Knew Too Much.

An Affair to Remember is the one that gets referenced in Sleepless in Seattle and arguably has the bigger stars (Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, as opposed to Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, the former of whom I'm not sure I knew). But I think I ultimately preferred Love Affair. There's just something so sympathetic about Dunne, and Boyer is very sympathetic for a Frenchman. (Sorry, any French readers who may be reading this, but your people are often portrayed as snooty or as unrepentant playboys.)

This is sort of a funny analysis because I think Kerr is great and Grant is probably my favorite classic actor among men. I just looked it up on Letterboxd and I also gave An Affair to Remember four stars, so whatever difference there may be between them, it's small.

And now that this is out of the way, I can enjoy Valentine's Day tonight totally unencumbered by my love of the cinema. The love of my life deserves my attention tonight.

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.