Search - An Affair to Remember on DVD

4 stars for the movie, 1 star for the "special edition" extr

Sharon Isch | Washington, DC USA | 01/15/2008

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is a review that assumes you already know the movie--possibly by heart by now--and are wondering if your love affair with "An Affair to Remember" needs this "50th Anniversary Special Edition" with the commentary track and mysterious, unexplained (on this page at least) second disc. Short answer: a resounding NO! What they (whoever they are) did was take a movie classic that millions love and that, as Deborah Kerr says, "people watch every six months to have a good cry," and bury it in blather.

Here's what's on disc two: 1. A few minutes of the Widow Grant talking about her love affair with Cary in the most unrevealing way imaginable. 2. A few minutes of screenwriter Peter Viertel, Kerr's second husband, talking about how their love affair broke up Kerr's first marriage, then inferring that he played around during their 30 years together and she put up with it because "she was a saint." 3. Endless minutes of Peter Bogdanovich and an all male bunch of academic talking heads blathering on about the life and works of director Leo McCarey, who also played around and was an alcoholic and whose suavity was said to be the inspiration for Cary Grant's screen personna. 4. Jerry Wald's brother and sons with a bio of the producer. 5. The return of the blathering academics to dissect the look of the movie. 6. Newsreel clips from the premiere and TA DA!...7. the only interesting and professional-looking piece on the entire bonus disc: an AMC "Backstory" feature which you may well have already seen on TV and which dishes some interesting dirt accompanied by decent visuals.

Having wasted my ears on disc 2 before trying out the commentary track on disc 1, I was admittedly blathered out and it didn't help that the film historian-commentator early on started getting some plot points wrong. But what pushed me to the "off" button was his anecdote about meeting Cary Grant after Grant's retirement and introducing himself by saying (oh barf) "I come to you with a message from the women of America: they want you to return to the screen," to which good old Cary replied, "What did you do, take a poll?"

You'll note that they waited to release the 50th anniversary edition of this 1957 movie until 2008. I suspect the reason is they had to wait for all the principals to be dead (Kerr and Viertel died in the fall of '07) before they could get away with producing a tribute that's so on-the-cheap and unworthy.

Ah, how I'd love to read Nora Ephron's take on this debacle.

As the British radio guy says in his signoff at the beginning of the movie: Well....there you have it.
"