An Affair to Remember
Our love affair with the film and the song
There are no infallible formulas for box office success, but remaking a romantic weepy with Cary Grant above the title comes close.
The director was also up there on the billboards (‘Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember). McCarey was better known than he is now but even in 1957 he was not a household name like Hitchcock. And after a couple of early 1950s misfires, he needed a big hit.
The film he set about updating and upgrading was Love Affair (1939) a sleeper sensation for RKO. This was a daunting task, even with colour and Cary and a relaxation of the Hays code.
Love Affair had generated mild controversy. The initial screenplay turned down by the Production Code Administration on the grounds that the story endorsed adultery. To counter this, the makers played down the implied sin by the extreme decorum of its presentation.
Around the piano with Grandma
High seriousness is reinforced by the use of music. Terry’s (Irene Dunne) recital of “Plaisir D’Amour” is accompanied by grande dame Grandma Janou (‘a great pianist, you know’). Grandma J’s endorsement reassures us that this love affair floats above messy moral dilemmas about broken engagements. We are on an exotic island, in a dreamworld of eternal romance.
Wishing (will make it so), the signature song, personally chosen by Irene Dunne, underlines this sense of an affair with a higher purpose.
With the the help of brave Terry, a ukulele, a wheelchair and cute orphans Wishing earned a Best Song Oscar nomination. It also set a daunting standard for the remake. The musical bar had been set higher than that fence the kids clamber up to peer at the heroine.
Who could possibly rise to this challenge? Wishing composer Buddy De Sylva had left the building while Harold Arlen, writer of Sing My Heart, was in poor physical and psychological shape. That left one plausible candidate.
Call for Harry
Twenty-four years after his Oscar for 42nd Street (1933) Harry Warren was still the guy to go for the take home tune.
Warren was the master of the made-to-measure melody, customised to work seamlessly with whatever was happening on screen. An Affair required the pure, yearning romance of his second Oscar winner “You’ll Never Know” but refined to match new audience expectations.
Harry experimented with 25 different versions — before coming up with the perfect melodic line.
Singing styles
One key element of the musical update was adapting to a shift in vocal styles. Even in 1939 operatic voices were already seen as a little hoity-toity and were generally restricted to stock comic characters like Margaret Dupont in the Marx Brothers films. One reason why MGM tried to nix Over the Rainbow was that while Judy could manage that opening octave leap, most of the girls in Kansas couldn’t.
By the late 50s, Doris Day had further tilted musical taste towards homespun intimacy — and nothing is harder to write than simple. How could Warren capture grandeur of “Plaisir D’Amour”, for example, without inducing hoots of derision from the cheap seats?
As ever, he came up with a clever twist. Recycling the main theme, he creates a ‘new’ song with classical gravitas. Like Edelweiss in The Sound of Music, C’est Belle L’amour convinces audiences that they are listening to a folk song from the mists of time, rather than 20th Century Fox studio lot.
Words
Leo McKern helped himself to to a share of the royalties for the title song via a credit — a standard perk of the time. For this he supplied the title and notes about what was happening on screen.
Another veteran Harold Adamson provided the rest of the words. Also a skilled composer, Adamson specialised in converting titles and strap-lines into memorable hooks. For Around the World in 80 Days (1955) he wrote the standard Around the World. Doing the same for An Affair to Remember would be beyond Shakespeare but the subtitle is there from the get-go.
Our love affair is a wondrous thing
That we’ll rejoice in remembering
Words that on paper seem a tad strained (‘wondrous’, ‘rejoice’) work musically. They melt into the melody and into our memories. What on paper reads like Hallmark boilerplate — That we may live and we may share/A flame to burn through eternity – undergoes an alchemical transformation when embracing Warren’s notes.
Who sung what?
An Affair to Remember (Our Love Affair) is sang over the titles by Vic Damone. Damone was an old school crooner, probably now best remembered for singing forlornly on the street where Eliza Dolittle lived in My Fair Lady (1964).
His booming baritone, with swirling orchestral accompaniment, worked brilliantly in darkened movie theatres. The pop music market, listening on tinny transistor radios, was less impressed. Softer, smoother versions did much better — most notably a tie-in single by Nat King Cole (1957) and a later one by Johnny Mathis (1965).
Interestingly Cole features on the soundtrack of Sleepless in Seattle (1993) singing Stardust but it is an instrumental version of An Affair to Remember that forms the musical bridge between the two films.
The soprano Marni Nixon (who worked with Bernstein) dubbed the singing voice of Deborah Kerr, as she had done on The King and I three years earlier. Though the dubbing question caused much harrumphing with regard to other stars like Natalie Wood, the Kerr/Nixon alliance was approved of by both parties, who worked closely together.
To see Kerr on the sleeve and then hear Nixon through your speakers is an disconcerting switcheroo — but only consenting adults were involved in the recording of those very high notes.
A special screening of An Affair to Remember is taking place at the Curzon Cinema, Clevedon on November 25 — details of this and the Carry Comes Home bienniel festival here.
