The McCarey Treatment: "An Affair to Remember," "Love Affair," And "Sleepless in Seattle"

Some time after my book Made Men: The Story of 'Goodfellas' was published, my editor at Hnover Square Press and I were discussing a followup, and I thought it would be fun to do something counterintuitive. The 30th anniversary of the release of Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle was nigh. The movie interested me for a number of reasons, not least of them being its links to classical Hollywood. Specifically the way the whole plot hinges on that of two prior films directed by Leo McCarey. I also had a wonderful experience with Nick Pileggi, the patriarch of Goodfellas who had been Ephron's husband until her death in 2012. He thought the project a good idea, gave me a couple of contacts, and stepped aside. He insisted that his and Ephron's professional activities had almost no crossover. (This despite Ephron taking enthusiastic interest in Nick's mob-chronicling work, and crafting the script of My Blue Heaven around her own personal experience of Henry Hill.)

The project was fun for a little while, and then less fun, and then a bit nightmarish. I'm not inclined to detail it here. Well — one thing was that nobody in the cast would speak with me and every behind-the-scenes individual I did interview had an axe or two to grind with respect to Ephron. The best part of the process was interviewing Calvin Trillin, a hero of mine who has a small role in Sleepless, and who said to me, unprompted, about his friend, "Nora was bossy."

Anyway, At a certain point I gave it up and started work on what has recently been published as The World Is Yours: The Story of 'Scarface.' Fun! 

But I shouldn't let what work I did do on the Sleepless project go to waste, and I have been neglecting this poor blog for quite some time (although a new Blu-ray-4K Ultra Consumer Guide is in fact in the works and should be up before the end of August). So I give you my chapter on the McCarey films, keeping the bracketed source citations that would have gone in the back of the actual book intact just so you can see how scrupulous I am. 

 

            One of the most affectionately cited scenes in Sleepless in Seattle is the one on which it’s the guys’ turn to talk about An Affair to Remember. It may indeed have had an inordinate and not salutary effect on mainstream intragender movie discourse

            “It’s a chick movie” is how Sam describes it. That’s enough, in his mind, and the mind of his brother-in-law Greg, played by Victor Garber, to dismiss it entirely. Not in a malicious, shoot-it-into-the-sun way; they just would prefer it not sully their consciousnesses too much. They’ll sit through such an item if necessary — it’s a generous gesture on date night — but that’s it. After sister-in-law Suzy, played by Rita Wilson, Hanks’ wife in real life, goes through an elaborate, emotional monologue on the heartbreaking qualities of Affair — one that we have been primed for by the conversations between Annie and Becky about the picture — Sam and Greg jokingly describe their emotional responses to mid-60s action blockbuster. “I cried at the end of The Dirty Dozen,” Victor Garber’s Greg says of the Robert-Aldrich-directed World War II picture about a suicide squad of largely psychotic misfits, most of whom indeed do buy it by the picture’s end. Tom Hanks’ Sam invokes cast member Trini Lopez as having endured a particularly poignant end. Lopez, a pop star who rocketed to superstardom playing Latin-tinged fare, was one of two bits of stunt casting in Dozen; the other was record-breaking fullback Jim Brown, who of course was obliged to show off his remarkable running-with-something-in-his-hands skills (in this case a series of grenades rather than a football) for the movie’s thrilling climax.

            “Stop it you guys,“ Suzy says after a bit, still sniffling. The banter, however, is good natured; not the out-for-blood culture war stuff you see too frequently on social media nowadays.

            If you’ve read Nora Ephron’s essays, and seen the movies she made, the casual allusions they contain would incline you to believe that weaving An Affair to Remember into the narrative of Sleepless in Seattle was her idea. I myself was a little surprised to learn from Jeff Arch that the device was indeed his, and that it went back to an experience he had in his late teens, watching Affair on television with his girlfriend. The movie, he says, struck him as improbably sentimental drivel throughout. And yet at the end he found himself reduced to tears. And that’s the difference between Arch and the Sleepless guys: they do not melt at the end of Affair. (Nor, we can confidently infer, do they cry at the end of The Dirty Dozen.)

            Arch recalls: “I was watching on TV with a girlfriend in college, in 1974. At one point I was just so fed up and I thought this was so hokey. I was cynical and I turned to her – I'm a Sagittarius, and we’re known for not knowing when to shut up. I was about to make the biggest crack about what a crock of shit this thing is, and I saw she was crying like Niagara Falls. One of the few times in my life where I didn’t say the thing I was going to say because I saw the power of that. And then I got kind of into the device — you know, it is a very powerful structurally thing. And then we talked. While we were really close, I had the girlfriend out of town and she had the boyfriend out at a different college.   And I said to her, “Look, if our lives don't work out, we’ll meet at the top of the Empire State Building on New Years’ Day of 1980,” which seems — when you’re in 1974 and you’re 19 or 20 years old — like a really, really long time.

            “She said, ‘Sure.’ And we didn’t meet, because things…worked out differently. Then at some point, had an idea to write a play about two people who only speak to each other on the phone for business, and then eventually meet. I couldn’t figure out how to do that. I just had this visual of their desks on stage starting at extreme ends and as the play moved on, their debts were going to move closer. So I had an idea of people falling in love before they met each other, with that pretext.”

            An Affair to Remember, a lush, widescreen and color affair made for 20^th Century Fox, is arguably a swan song of American romantic cinema, or comedy, or tragicomedy. The 1957 movie and its original Love Affair, from 1939, were both conceived, co-written and directed by Leo McCarey, a director elevated to reassessment in the 1960s when Andrew Sarris pronounced him a “Far Side of Paradise” auteur in The American Cinema: Directors and Direction 1929 to 1968 and Peter Bogdanovich recorded an oral history with McCarey for the American Film Institute. McCarey’s movies ran the gamut; he began as a director of Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts, gave the Marx Brothers their collective anarchic heads in Duck Soup, waved the flag in a heartwarming and funny fashion in Ruggles of Red Gap, made romantic comedy a little less screwball than Howard Hawks did with The Awful Truth.

            An Affair to Remember at least in part exists because of a regret that Cary Grant carried with him for a couple of decades. In 1937 Grant worked with director Leo McCarey on the classic screwball comedy The Awful Truth, co-starring with Irene Dunne. Grant’s experience was, from his perspective, less than ideal. McCarey had an improvisational approach that Grant wasn’t used to. He visited the set of the 1939 Love Affair and saw what wonders the McCarey touch achieved with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne and pictured himself in the Boyer role.

            On an audio commentary recorded for a DVD edition of Sleepless in Seattle, Nora Ephron says “film snobs think Love Affair is better than An Affair to Remember but nothing to me is as good as Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.” You can’t call Leo McCarey a film snob, but he too preferred Love Affair to Affair to Remember. Displaying what F. Scott Fitzgerald considered the hallmark of a first-rate intelligence (that is, the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head and still retain the ability to function), McCarey also allowed, in his way, that Cary Grant was the ideal star to sell this tale. He had written the role of Nicky for Charles Boyer, yes. But, as he told Peter Bogdanovich: “Boyer came out much better than Cary. But Cary meant a lot more at the box office.” One could argue in the case of An Affair To Remember, that this wasn’t merely reflexive; watching Love Affair today, there’s a sense in which Boyer’s performance feels less than contemporary, while Grant (possibly in part because his persona is still considered and experienced as archetypal) has more enduring credibility. To be more specific, Boyer’s stateliness is particularly to pertinent to the religiosity of Love Affair which is largely absent in Affair to Remember and, let’s be frank, would have likely been a turn off to the characters in Sleepless.

            McCarey and Grant worked together again twice after Truth, on the Garson Kanin-directed My Favorite Wife (which McCarey developed, helped write, and was set to direct; an automobile accident put him, according to second female lead Gail Patrick, “at death’s door,” [James Bawden, Films in Review, 1981] but he remained as producer) and Once Upon A Honeymoon.  As much as McCarey and Grant had not gotten along on Truth, it’s been argued that McCarey, a dapper dresser who could be hilarious and insouciant before the film industry and alcoholism stressed him out of shape, helped shape what became known as the Grant persona. The confidence, the swings between understatement and manic comic indignation, the style, the walk — all these aspects of what we consider the quintessential Grant persona are honed to perfection in Grant’s performance in The Awful Truth. Director Alfred Hitchcock, whom McCarey is on the record as admiring, refined these aspects of Grant’s screen personality even further.

            And except for the clothes sense, apparently few if any of the personality traits we see in Grant on screen were manifested by Grant in real life. In his sometimes acid memoir, Dropped Names, Frank Langella recalls dining with Tony Curtis, who had idolized Grant growing up and eventually worked with him on Blake Edwards’ 1959 Operation Petticoat. Because it was a “huge hit” Curtis allowed that he would have worked with Grant again anytime, he was astonished at the gap between the man and his screen persona. “The guy turns out to be a fucking bore,” Langella quotes Curtis. “He knew better than all of us where to put the camera, how to say the line, how to play the scene. He had no humor and no charm. I would do anything to avoid having lunch with him.” Langella had heard similarly from Mel Brooks. “I thought I’d kill myself if I had to eat a meal with this guy again.”  [Langella pg. 308]

            McCarey responded “Impossible” to Bogdanovich when asked what Grant was like to work with on The Awful Truth. By the same token, at this point in his career, Grant might have considered McCarey similarly. In the second volume of his biography of Bing Crosby — whose public persona was humongously enhanced by his portrayal of kindly but hip priest Father O’Malley in McCarey’s hit Going My Way and its sequel The Bells of Saint Mary’s — Gary Giddins writes: “McCarey’s method of shooting […] demanded more concentration than memorizing a script. Leo’s actors related similar anecdotes attesting to the mood on his sets. George Burns wrote of W.C. Fields sitting by himself in a corner, learning his lines during the filming of Six of a Kind; he had given up learning them at home the night before after he realized they changed every day. Ralph Bellamy groused that on The Awful Truth, nobody but McCarey knew what was going on. On The Milky Way, McCarey acted out for Adolph Menjou a long, illogical speech he wanted him to deliver for his big scene with Harold Lloyd. After he ‘did it for me with all the gestures,’ Menjou wrote, McCarey asked, ‘Why not adlib it,’ as it’s all ‘hocus pocus’ anyway? ‘Maybe,’ Leo joked, ‘we’ve discovered a new technique…. The McCarey system, the ultimate in the true are of making motion pictures.’ Menjou summed it up: ‘He was kidding about the new technique [but] he wasn’t kidding about adlibbing the scene.’” [pg 344, Giddins]

            The set of An Affair To Remember was not so confusing, in part because Grant and Kerr already had a template to work from: the original Love Affair. Both films hinge on two substantial plot components: the ocean cruise on which the lovers, separated from their land-based obligations, romantic and otherwise, and locked in a kind of romantic isolation that’s only enhanced by a visit to a venerated relation, and the proposed rendezvous at the Empire State Building.

            These were visions that occurred to McCarey while returning from a European vacation with his wife Stella. The time off — they departed from Hollywood in October of 1937 — was well-deserved and much needed. McCarey had not one but two masterpieces out that year, one being The Awful Truth and the other the heartbreaking tragedy of old age Make Way For Tomorrow, a still-devastating picture about the inverse of parental neglect of children that reportedly inspired the Yasuhiro Ozu classic Tokyo Story. McCarey was fond of both pictures but held Tomorrow closest to his heart — he was to remark, when accepting the Best Director award for Truth in March of 1938, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”

            As much as he needed, and got, some rest and relaxation his trip, on the cruise back to the States something was gnawing at him. And Stella noticed. McCarey recalled to Bogdanovich his wife saying, “You’re always at you lowest ebb when you’re trying to get a new idea.” [Bog pg 417] After a period of stewing, he got the new idea. Here’s how he put it to Stella: “Suppose you and I were talking to each other when the boat sailed from England and we got to know each other on the trip. We felt ourselves inseparable. By the time the trip was over, we were madly in love with each other but by the time the boat docked we have found out that each is obligated to somebody else.” [Bog.pg 417]

            The Empire State Building idea came later. At the end of the cruise, when McCarey looked at the Manhattan skyline (the same skyline, minus the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, that inspired Fritz Lang to concoct Metropolis; Lang’s first sight of it was in 1924). And from there he concocted the twist: Terri’s inability to make the rendezvous there because of being incapacitated in an auto accident. “I have a theory,” McCarey told Bogdanovich, “which I call the ineluctability of incidents. The idea is that if something happens, some other thing inevitable flows from it — like night follows day; events are linked together. I always develop my stories that way, in a series of events that succeed and provoke each other. I never really have intrigues.” [Bog., pg 416] Terri’s disappearance is certainly a provoking incident. But it’s one that Nicky takes to be an intrigue, freezing him — and her — up when they run into each other at a concert, before their painful and glorious rediscovery of each other and reconciliation.  

            With these ideas in place, McCarey fleshed out the story with Mildred Cram, then turned over screenwriting duties to Donald Ogden Stewart (who helped adapt Holiday, the Philip Barry play which George Cukor filmed with Grant and Katharine Hepburn) and Delmar Daves. It would take almost a year for McCarey’s notions to hit a soundstage: The shooting of the film then titled Love Match commenced on October 3, 1938. While gossip columnists reported that the female lead was coveted by actresses ranging from Greta Garbo to Helen Hayes [Gehring, pg. 139] McCarey had,” hand-tailored” for Love Affair his Awful Truth star Irene Dunne, “which included making her a nightclub entertainer in order that Irene could sing during the picture.” [Bog pg 417] He did not tailor Nicky to Cary Grant. Indeed, the ebullience inherent in Dunne notwithstanding, McCarey biographer Wes D. Gehring sees in the creation of Love Affair McCarey steering to a more overtly and comprehensive sincerity: “Romantic comedy’s one-foot-in-reality-base suited McCarey better than the ludicrousness of screwball farce,” he avers.

            The resultant film was received rhapsodically, and not just by film snobs, either. Gehring cites a characteristic contemporary review from Clark Wales of the trade publication Screen and Radio Weekly: “Recommending a Leo McCarey production is something like recommending a million dollars or beauty or a long and happy life. Any of these is a very fine thing to have and the only trouble is that there are not enough of them.” While box-office figures are not readily available, the movie proved to be the second-most popular to be produced and distributed by RKO Pictures, the first having been George Stevens’ Kipling-inspired adventure picture Gunga Din, which starred…Cary Grant.

            McCarey’s 1940s were defined by the two blockbusters Going My Way and The Bells of Saint Mary’s, after which he made Good Sam, another fantasia of Catholic faith (“Sam,” besides being the name of the lead character played by Gary Cooper, stood for “Samaritan”). It was less well-received and indeed has not been subjected to any meaningful critical reassessment. One can picture McCarey at that low ebb, looking for ideas as the 1950s commenced. Gehring speculates about the reasons for McCarey’s reduced productivity. Alcoholism, and an increasing dependence on painkillers that he began using in the wake of the 1939 auto accident that had taken him out of the director’s chair on My Favorite Wife. McCarey also suffered a terrible personal loss in the months after the release of Good Sam: the suicide death of his younger brother, Ray, with whom he had been close. And of course there was what film historian Joseph McBride has called (with respect to McCarey’s friend and colleague Frank Capra) “the catastrophe of success.” Going My Way and Bells had been such monumental, zeitgeist-defining hits that McCarey was very possibly torn between the impulse to try to duplicate them and the desire to break free of them. Hence, as Gehring puts it, he pursued “some very odd unrealized film proposals.” One being a picture about Adam and Eve — he’d privately hatched the idea in the thirties — starring Bells female lead Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne. McCarey spent a lot of money on research, and on the talents of songwriter Harry Warren, developing a musical about Marco Polo. He also wanted his friend Alfred Hitchcock to act for him, in a picture in which the Master of Suspense would “get away with the perfect crime.” [Gehring, pg. 219].

            In any event, his first realized picture of the 1950s was 1952’s My Son John, a HUAC-boosting anti-Communist family melodrama whose production was highly inconvenienced by the death of leading man Robert Walker prior to the end of principal photography. McCarey was forced to cobble together his finale, in which John sees the error of his Red ways, from footage in his friend Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and to contemporary eyes the hedging and splicing is very plain to see, and somewhat cringe-inducing. Would the picture have been less so had Walker lived to complete his performance? Difficult to say. To these eyes, John is the movie in which the patriotism of Ruggles of Red Gap curdles into paranoia. Its my-country-right-or-wrong ethos is blunt to the point of bathos, and as the critic Robin Wood has pointed out, it’s almost completely contradicted in the late McCarey film Rally Round The Flag, Boys, which just underscores how impossible it is to expect coherent politics out of a lot of classical Hollywood filmmakers. John got a bit of a shellacking from the press but was placed in the top ten films of 1952 list by the ever-mysterious National Board of Review, and got an award from the Catholic Institute of the Press because of course it did. Its box office was low.

            1952 was also the year in which rumors of a Love Affair remake began circulating: in November of that year, syndicated columnist Joe Hyams reported that Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl, who would marry in 1952 (and present the world with future prime time soap sensation Lorenzo Lamas four years later) were interested in starring in a new version of the picture. But it was Twentieth Century Fox and Cary Grant who were the motors for the 1957 movie. In his 1984 biography of Grant, Haunted Idol, Geoffrey Wansell writes that Grant “could still remember visiting the set of the original to talk with Irene Dunne and wishing he had been playing in it.”

            In McCarey’s estimation, Grant went from “impossible” to “terrific” in An Affair to Remember. The remake, as was customary from Twentieth Century Fox since its introduction of the format in 1953, was in breathtaking widescreen CinemaScope and glorious DeLuxe Color (this was a one-strip variant of Technicolor, which required three strips of film being exposed at once, in synch with each other). The sound was Westrex stereo, showcasing the sumptuous voice of Vic Damone singing the title song, music by Harry Warren and lyrics in part by McCarey himself. This was McCarey’s first time out with color and widescreen, and ace cinematographer Milton Krasner, who’d been working in the CinemaScope format since its beginnings — lensing the melodrama/romantic travelogue Three Coins in the Fountain and the sword-and-sandal Christianity epic Demetrius and the Gladiators (directed, as it happens, by Delmer Daves) practically back to back for 1954 releases — grounded the visuals beautifully. The technical “improvements” aside, McCarey saw the remake as an opportunity to reach a new audience. He told Bogdanovich, “A lot of people said it was the best love story they ever saw on screen — and it’s also my favorite love story. Two decades had passed; a lot of young people couldn’t have seen the first version, so I felt I should tell the story again — for them.” Prior to shooting the picture, he told the New York Times that contemporary Hollywood was “afraid of honest emotion. It’s considered old-fashioned if a fellow takes his hat off to kiss a girl. They all seem to be trying to find a trick way to say ‘I love you.’ What are they trying to prove? Love is the oldest and noblest emotion.” (Eventually, when asked to name his favorites among his pictures, McCarey would reflect, “Well, I guess Make Way For Tomorrow, Love Affair, An Affair to Remember, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s. There are moments I like in all the films. I’ve always said, if only I could make a picture out of just the favorite moments.”)

            If leading lady Deborah Kerr was hard-pressed to reproduce the ebullience of Irene Dunne (and indeed, while Terry remains a singer in the remake, she’s an altogether more subdued kind than Dunne — not quite lounge as opposed to nightclub, but certainly more of a natural balladeer in attitude; her singing voice was dubbed by the perennial Marni Nixon), she certainly could sell nobility without breaking a sweat.

            As for Cary Grant, he was, as he entered his early fifties, arguably at his apogee as a screen star. If we agree that Affair was his peak as a romantic lead, we can note that in North By Northwest, produced a few years after Affair, represented his apotheosis as a Hitchcock lead. These achievements help explain why, for Ephron, Affair was the Hollywood Romantic Film and a superior iteration of Love Affair. Affair to Remember starred an all-caps Cary Grant. As much as Boyer had been in vogue after Pepe Le Moko and Algiers, he never quite made it to all-caps status. (By 1957 Boyer had moved into supporting roles in film; see his work as a fatherly but not quite competent sanitarium administrator in Vincente Minnelli’s 1955 The Cobweb. He had also made himself a tidy sum in television production.)

Comments

[Oliver]

A thorough and digressive, yet fluid read!

[Mike Molloy]

Fun and interesting read, thank you.

[George]

I read "The World Is Yours" over the weekend. A great read, highly recommended. Looking forward to Glenn's next book.

[Pinko Punko]

Wonderful read- truly a mesmerizing rhythm and flow. Thank you

[Phil]

This is a great insightful read and I am very grateful you shared it. I discovered your blog in the past 8 or 9 months and I love it. I hope you continue to post!