Director Leo McCarey's original black-and-white version of what he would later remake into An Affair to Remember. Heart-crusher Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer) meets Terry McKay (Irene Dunne) on a ship sailing from Naples to New York. He is engaged to Lois Clark, an heiress worth $200 million; she, a girl from Kansas who became a nightclub singer in the Big Apple, is engaged to her boss for whom she's been on a buying trip to Paris. Fearful of word getting out about their being seen with each other, Terry says, "Being with you is news."

During a four-hour stop in Porto Santo, Madeira, Michel takes Terry for a visit with his frail grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya received an Oscar, best supporting actress, for ten minutes of screen time). She and Terry take a strong liking to each other, allowing her to confess to Terry her worries about her grandson, whom "a good woman could make right." When Terry remarks on a lovely landscape painting, Grandmother informs her of Michel's artistic talent; and when Terry compliments her shawl, she promises to send it to her one day.

Back on the ship, Michel and Terry share a kiss after which Terry says: "We're heading into a rough sea, Michel." Discussing their options (everything pleasurable in life seems to be illegal, immoral, or fattening), realizing their limitations - Michel admits to never having had to work in his life while Terry agrees, "You and I have been used to a life of pink champagne" - they nonetheless make a wish and set a time six months hence atop the Empire State Building ("the nearest thing we have to heaven in New York") to see if it might come true.

Standing on a balcony at night in a pensive mood beside a glass door with the reflection of the world's tallest building at her side (a replica of this scene appears in the 1994 remake with Annette Bening), Terry decides to leave her fiancé Ken and move to Philadelphia to again pursue a career as a nightclub singer. Her landlady warns her against marrying a loafer as she did. Meanwhile Michel, also unengaged, is painting billboards while trying to sell his canvases.

On July 1st Terry returns to New York, stops into Ken's store where he finds her just as she hurries off to meet her 5 o'clock appointment, but gets struck down in an intersection looking upward. Hearing a siren but unaware of the accident far below, Michel waits through a thunderstorm until midnight before leaving behind his dreams and sailing back to Madeira. Crippled and in a wheelchair, Terry accepts a humble position teaching music in an orphanage where the children sing "Wishing Will Make It So."

On Christmas Eve Michel and Lois attend a musical where as they are leaving he sees Terry and Ken; Terry says ironically to her former beau: "The show is over; the boy gets the girl." Michel comes to Terry's apartment on Christmas Day with his grandmother's shawl as a gift and a poignant confession about their date six months earlier: "I had an appointment … I didn't keep it." But as he is telling her an invention of the past, he relates a curious actual recent event in which a woman in a wheelchair of limited means came into the gallery where his paintings were sold and after expressing great enthusiasm for the painting that she couldn't afford received the last unsold work of a young woman in a white shawl …

In this version Michel suddenly realizes that Terry was the woman in the gallery and begins fanatically searching for the painting, which he finds in her bedroom; whereas in the Beatty/Bening version Michael seems to know beforehand that Terry had the painting from the restaurant and thus had been crippled. I much prefer both the remake and the remake of the remake to the original.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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