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GIGOLO, GIGOLETTE
Celebrating its 50th anniversary, An Affair to Remember isn't much more than a shipboard comedy turned sticky-gooey Catholic morality lesson about the dangers of love at first tourist spot during the Eisenhower era. Cary Grant's a failed artist as “big dame hunter” gigolo engaged to an equally purposeless rich bitch; Deborah Kerr pretends to be a swanky nightclub chanteuse but, given that her furs, diamonds and Park Avenue penthouse are paid for by her betrothed, she's really just a gigolette. They meet on a luxury liner and oh but of course they're smitten by each other's beauty, charm, unavailability. Yet nothing Grant says convinces Kerr that he's worth dumping her billpayer for—until he takes her to visit his grandmother, the incomparably nauseous Cathleen Nesbitt. Suddenly Grant possesses everything Kerr wants, even though he's got zilch. And he's overwhelmed too—Kerr's the dream girl of a lifetime. Why, she even sings in French and gives old granny an impromptu heart-wrenching hug! Though Nesbitt's moments tax to the max, and the engineered schmaltz later on is like a super wet Depend, it's Kerr & Grant's on-ship romance that begins to burden our tolerances about them as a couple; the “affair” is never quite denied, but it's never quite confirmed, either. You can see how the director Leo McCarey's Catholicism skirts around the bedroom issue. (And also avoids how Grant manages to replenish his bank account. Where did the money come from to book two additional trips on the S.S. Constitution?) For the first hour, despite the SOSs, this movie sails; it's the second hour, when McCarey turns these two courtesans into saints, that nearly sinks it. A matter of fact that Grant was undergoing psychiatrist-administered LSD treatments before and during the making of Affair. While there's no way to detect anything druggy about his performance, there's a quietly palable element of an after-trip exhaustion about him here that seems to fortify his trademark style of later years—he gives somnambulism a fresh coat of class, he elocutes his lines in a virtual but almost convincing slow motion. (Despite his infamous perfectionism on the set, Grant could never be accused of being a great actor and he said more than once, “I was an utter fake, a know-it-all who knew very little.” That feeling reinforced by Hitchcock, who'd personally tell Grant, “The best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well.”) It was his intent in Affair to bring out something more personal of himself, to be less the fake he felt inside, never more apparent than in The Pride and the Passion. If we accept that women are willing to bid for his services because his everlasting Coppertone technique gets their juices flowing, there's barely an ounce of credibility he's some kind of artist in search of spiritual renewal, which was partly the reason he gave for experimenting with LSD in the first place. In too many scenes he's trapped in maudlin bits no actor could play without gagging. And his character's “art” represents less the intended maturity and more the worst of McCarey's idealism—it's Left Bank off-season tourist religiosity. A question finally answered: that knot in the middle of Grant's forehead was a benign tumor, removed a few weeks after filming was completed. Deborah Kerr never looked more toothsome: decked out in designer clothes, draped in stoles, capped by soft red hair, she's almost a set all by herself; she exudes an amusing theatricality. Like Grant, there's no way she can redeem the sap-sucking moments she's stuck in—especially the pre-Sound of Music ones with those rainbow coalition kids singing such scratching-against-the-blackboard stuff like “He Knows You Inside” and “Tomorrow Land.” But she's there as the perfect Grant woman and who could argue they aren't made for each other? Kerr's given superior performances in other films, but here, on a holiday from acting, she's Grant's tear-soaked Xmas present. And ours. With Richard Denning as Kerr's credit dispenser, and Neva Patterson who, as Grant's former check book, does some skillful dumbfoundness during Robert Q. Lewis's TV interview. Text COPYRIGHT © 2008 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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