Last night I watched An Affair to Remember on TV. I'd been meaning to watch it for a while. I generally like old movies like that, even when I don't like them, since the dialogue sounds so funny. Not funny haha, just funny odd. I think it's cool to see how different they are from movies now.
It goes like this: Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr meet on an ocean liner headed back to New York from a nondescript European location. Grant is a world-famous lady-killer on his way home to marry a filthy rich heiress and thus secure his lavish lifestyle; Kerr is the poor-but-beautiful-nightclub-singer-turned-housewife-in-training of some wealthy New York businessman. Aboard, they fall in love, much to the gossipy amusement of their fellow passengers and the ship's photographer who acts a bit like a modern-day paparazzi. (Actually, they really get into one another when the ship is docked for a few hours near his grandmother's home and they go and visit her. What I want to know is where the hell they are supposed to be docked. They get there after at least one, maybe two nights aboard the ship. It's tropical, and you sort of get the sense that her late husband was some sort of colonial official. But what tropical destinations lie two-days' journey away from Europe on the way to New York City? It is a movie, I realize.) Anyway, they decide that they want to be together forever, so they vow to meet one another at the top of the Empire State Building in six months, giving them enough time to break it off with their current beaus and enough time to do some hard work and save some money on their own. When the evening of the meeting finally arrives, he's *SPOILER ALERT* there waiting, but she gets hit by a car as she's rushing up to meet him. He's humiliated; she's in the hospital, unable to walk again; they're both heartbroken. The rest of the movie sorts out whether or not they'll end up together.
That's probably when I should have turned the movie off.
See, now she has to become a teacher (Oh! The horror! What a tragedy!), so she teaches music at a Catholic elementary school. There's an unnecessarily long scene in which she's directing the choir, and all of the lovely little children are singing about resisting temptation, blah, blah, blah, and there are lots of little solos built into the oh-so-cute song so that the camera can close-in on their adorable little up-turned faces. Then, for the first time in the scene that's been going about three minutes, the camera pans over two Black children's faces just in time for them to part through the choir from the back row to the front to do some silly minstrel-like dance and sing-song verse that's totally separate from the song's melody. (Y'know, it's not unlike McCauley Culkin's little "rap" in the middle of MJ's "Black or White" video, now that I think about it.)
The kids are back a few scenes later to visit their beloved teach while she rests at home (or maybe it's in a hospital?). This time, the Black boy gets to open the scene for he children by asking, "Is she going to be okay, Doc?" only to be quickly corrected by the children's accompanying priest, "Call him, Doctor!" How dare that boy not codeswitch!
I googled around a little bit looking for commentary on these ridiculous, racist, and highly removable scenes, but couldn't really find much. There were several reviewers who suggested that the scenes with the children were unnecessary inasmuch as they distract from the shmoopie love story.
And as if that shit weren't enough to make this movie a "not" for me, much of the justification for the lovers' agonizing separation after their fateful missed connection is that of course she can't tell him that she's disabled! How terrible and disgusting and unlovable! Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...
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