|
Miss America and "the greatest headwaiter in Europe," a barefoot tango across oceans. Darkness and light in a most fluid mise en scène, thus the noir melodrama of jealousy quickly segueing into a screwball romance, and Frank Borzage is just getting warmed up. The socialite (Jean Arthur) flees her obsessive husband (Colin Clive) in Paris, he arranges for her to be caught in compromising positions but she's rescued by a stranger (Charles Boyer), a jewel thief who's really a gallant maitre d'. The after-hours bistro is their private haven of champagne and violins; "I needed tonight more than anything in my life," the dawn brings murder charges and gilded cages. So it goes ahead of Love Affair, changing tones and genres and continents on the way to that transcendent sinking feeling. "Well, what do ya suppose from those!" More twists prepare the Manhattan reunion, he turns restauranteur (the joint with watery bouillabaisse and surly waiters gets a makeover, one table is eternally reserved for the elusive lady) while she hides out as a model but is found by the psychotic shipbuilder. Tears and laughter, the heroine mingles them when confronting her marital captor with the irony of the affair ("You set up a trap to catch me with a man, and another one came along!") and then with raucous relief as the man of her dreams turns up to take their dinner order. Hands that caress, hands that suffocate, "hands where our never-sobered lips tremble" (Rimbaud). Suddenly the Titanic, baleful whistle amid fog and classic music in the stateroom right before the iceberg hits—by focusing on the emotions at stake rather than the technology on display, Borzage makes fifteen minutes count more than all of Cameron's three hours. History evoked and, miraculously, changed. "Love, or something." "Love and everything." Cinematography by Gregg Toland. With Leo Carrillo, Ivan Lebedeff, and George Meeker. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |