BEFORE: Technically, we just passed the halfway mark of winter - but mentally I'm done with it all. We tried to chop through the ice-wall that's blocking our driveway, but it was no use. We're more or less housebound until the thaw. This is what I don't get about the Winter Olympics - though I'm sure the ratings will be phenomenal, who the heck wants to watch winter sports when it's cold as hell outside? I mean, if I wanted to watch people freezing or sliding across the ice or trudging through snow, I can just look out the window! Maybe one year they should have the Winter Olympics in Australia or something, just so when it's hot as balls out, we can watch people skiing or skating on ice or curling and feel like it's cooling us off, right? Or maybe that's just me.
Linking from "Breakfast at Tiffany's", Audrey Hepburn was also in "The Children's Hour" with James Garner (last seen in "My Fellow Americans").
THE PLOT: A poor and passionate young man falls in love with a rich young woman and gives her a sense of freedom. They soon are separated by their social differences.
AFTER: Here we go again, it's another socialite rich girl falling for a man of lower class. But at least he's not a reporter tonight, he's got more respectable jobs, first at a carnival, then at a lumber mill. But we're still back in the 1940's, at least for part of the film. The better news is, I'm done screwing around with screwball comedies. Valentine's Day is approaching fast, so it's time to get serious about romance here.
There is a love triangle here, and a framing sequence set in a nursing home, where a man reads the story to a woman with Alzheimer's. But what relationship, if any, do the old folks have to the people in the story? Are they the main characters? Ah, but that would be telling. And no fair peeking at the IMDB, it wouldn't help anyway, since the old people have nicknames, so you can't cheat.
More information about the young couple in the story, and the old people as well, is gradually revealed. As you play along, you might want to try and guess - is the old man the love of her life, or is he the "one that got away", or is he a random stranger? I don't think I'm spoiling anything here, those are really the only possible guesses.
Should our young heroine choose the man she can live with, or the one that she can't live without? The one that she fights with, which might also be the one that she loves more passionately, or the safe choice? It's perhaps a little more complicated than that, since our young lovers were separated first by her parents, then by WWII, then by time and space, but that's the general drift of things.
I think this is a perfect-film for Valentine's Day, because it shows several different kinds of love - both the hot, sweaty summer romance kind, the turbulent troublesome kind, and also the long-term commitment kind. It also highlights the fact that when you commit, you're locking yourself in to take the bad with the good - which means you might have to watch the person you love get very sick, or perhaps not even remember you. Such is life. It also acknowledges that a relationship requires work, and many romances tend to ignore that little fact.
But I fear I may have peaked too soon, finding the perfect (?) Valentine film on Feb. 10. This is the problem with programming films that I haven't seen, that I may have a limited knowledge of. I follow where the chain leads me, and I hope for luck or providence in where the films land.
Also starring Gena Rowlands (last seen in "Taking Lives"), Ryan Gosling (last seen in "All Good Things"), Rachel McAdams (last seen in "Mean Girls"), James Marsden (last seen in "Anchorman 2"), Kevin Connolly, Sam Shepard (last seen in "Safe House"), Joan Allen (last seen in "The Contender"), David Thornton.
RATING: 6 out of 10 paintbrushes
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