Love on the Silver Screen

by Karen Burroughs Hannsberry

For many people, Valentine’s Day is celebrated through flowers, candy, and greeting cards fairly dripping with sappy (but sincere!) sentiments. As for me, I like to dive into the world of classic movie rom coms, where the road to romance is often slippery but always leads to a haven of happiness at the end. Two of my favorite cinematic treats this time of year are Love Affair (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940), which take approaches to love that couldn’t be more varied, but are equally satisfying. 

Love Affair stars Charles Boyer as French would-be artist and “heart-crusher” Michel Marnet, who falls for singer Terry McKay (Irene Dunne) while the two are aboard a luxury liner bound for New York. It’s not too hard to understand Michel’s attraction to Terry – she’s not only attractive and oozing with charm, but she has a biting wit, an intelligent sense of humor, and a delightful tendency to speak her mind. As for Michel, he’s no slouch in the looks and charm department, either. (Speaking of Michel’s charm, keep your eyes peeled for actress Joan Leslie in the shipboard scene where a quartet of young ladies figuratively pounce on Michel to request his autograph. Leslie is the one who translates Michel’s inscription, which he writes in French: “You are very lovely girls, but you have very bad manners.”)

After a meet-cute involving a radiogram that blows out of Michel’s hand (and practically into Terry’s grasp), Terry and Michel quickly decide to have dinner together. They’re both engaged to others, though, and they mutually decide to nip their budding friendship in the bud – an arrangement that dissolves like sugar in hot tea when they wind up together at a port of call on the island of Madeira. Michel is there to visit his grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya) and invites Terry to join him; by the time they return to the ship a few hours later, the two are an item. (“There is many a slip betwixt the leap and the altar,” Michel’s grandmother tells Terry during a private moment, “and anything can happen on a boat.”) As they reach their final destination, Michel and Terry pledge to reunite in six months at the top of the Empire State Building – “the nearest thing to heaven we have in New York,” Terry explains. But this plan is thwarted by fate, and Michel and Terry are forced to take a far more circuitous route to find their way back to each other. 

Love Affair was directed by Leo McCarey, who also helmed such gems as Duck Soup (1933) and Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), as well as the 1957 remake of Love Affair, An Affair to Remember, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. When he first began his career as a director, McCarey specialized in comedies, and the early scenes of Love Affair reflect his light touch in this area, with Michel and Terry wittily trading barbs and then amusingly trying to disregard their obviously emerging feelings. But about halfway through, the film takes a decidedly somber tone and effortlessly ushers the viewer into an entirely different experience.

Interestingly, the other film under discussion – His Girl Friday – also walks a fine line between comedy and drama; because it’s undoubtedly a screwball comedy, though, the viewer can certainly expect more laughter than drama. This feature is a remake of the 1931 Pat O’Brien-Adolphe Menjou starrer, The Front Page, but offers a gender flip, transforming the “Hildy Johnson” character played by O’Brien into a woman – thereby adding a completely new dimension to the story. 

As His Girl Friday opens, newspaper reporter Hildy (Rosalind Russell) has just returned to town after obtaining a Reno divorce from Walter Burns (Cary Grant), editor of the paper and her former boss. She informs Walter that she has no plans to resume her job; instead, she is marrying insurance salesman Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy) – the following day – and moving with him to Albany, New York, where they’ll live the first year of their marriage with Bruce’s mother. The remainder of the movie focuses on Walter’s dual-pronged effort to (1) torpedo the marriage plans of Hildy and Bruce, and (2) lure Hildy back to the staff of the newspaper. 

In the film’s first scene between Hildy and Walter, we get a clear picture of what their pre-divorce relationship was like, with Walter putting his job above all else and treating Hildy more like a newspaperman than a woman – the couple didn’t even have a honeymoon because Walter assigned his bride to report on a coal mine cave-in. We also learn that Hildy has been wooed by the niceties from Bruce that she never received from Walter: a man who will light her cigarette, open doors for her, help her on with her coat, and shower her with syrupy endearments. 

Smack-dab in the middle of the film’s fast-paced hilarity is a weighty subplot involving the story Walter uses to entice Hildy into taking on one more assignment: a convict named Earl Williams (John Qualen) is scheduled to be executed for the fatal shooting of a Black police officer. While director Howard Hawks never abandons the film’s madcap, screwball overtones, he deftly uses the comedic scenes as a springboard for the messages related to political corruption and journalistic ethics – or the lack thereof. And beneath it all, the viewer is always aware that no matter what underhanded machinations Walter employs, or how angry and frustrated Hildy becomes, they are a match made in newspaper heaven. It’s clear, in fact, that Walter will do anything to get Hildy back into his life (both professionally and personally), and that Hildy is not as opposed to the notion as she might want to believe.

In the cinematic worlds depicted in both Love Affair and His Girl Friday, there are times when the viewer simply cannot imagine a favorable outcome – Terry and Michel harbor wildly mistaken assumptions about each other, and Hildy displays a (completely understandable) hostility toward Walter that only seems to compound with time. Still, in the end, the couples manage to discover that, despite these seemingly intractable obstacles, love really does conquer all. 

Or, as Terry predicts in Love Affair’s final reel, “Anything can happen, don’t you think?”

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Both films are available to watch on Film Masters' Youtube Channel, linked below.

Watch Now: His Girl Friday

Watch now: Love Affair