100 Great Film Romances

In 2002, there was a three-hour AFI tv special devoted to the 100 best love stories in film.  I had fun reliving a lot of old flicks and trying to guess ahead which would be chosen.  I had quite a few in the top ten, and I’d have been enraged if they hadn’t included The Way We Were (5^th) and An Affair to Remember (3^rd).  And, of course, every male’s favorite pretty woman, Julia Roberts, in Pretty Woman (21).  Gone with the Wind (my choice for #1) was second, and Casablanca was first. I guess those who love Casablanca are seeing something I’m not seeing.

I thought some on their list were odd or totally wrong choices: King Kong (24).  I beg your pardon?  Faye Raye and a big old gorilla?  Hardly. From Here to Eternity (20) was more about the military and less about love. On Golden Pond (22) was lovely, but old, curmudgeonly love is less lovely than young, fervent love. To Catch a Thief (46) was more about Cary’s cat burglary than romantic love. Last Tango in Paris (48) was more about sex than love. Bonnie and Clyde (65) was more about Depression Days bank robberies than love. A Streetcar Named Desire (67) was more about Stanley drunkenly screaming for his Stella than about love. Harold and Maude (69) was more the depiction of a February/December affection than love. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe (89) was more about the acid dialogue between two old nasties than about love. And The Hunchback of Notre Dame (98) must have been so much before my time that I don’t remember it or could even envision it as a great love. I was also surprised by the number of musicals included: An American in Paris (39), Singin’ in the Rain (16), My Fair Lady (12), The Sound of Music (27), and West Side Story (3).  All great movies, but hardly what I’d think of as great romances.

What about all the films they seem to have missed? Where were Newman and Woodward in The Long, Hot Summer? Where were Splash, East of Eden, Sayonara, You’ve Got Mail, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Tootsie, As Good as It Gets, Four Weddings and a Funeral? And what about The Crying Game, which put a whole new spin on the nature of love?

If I included some from the last two decades, they would be Punch Drunk Love, Juno, Moonrise Kingdom, Notting Hill, 500 Days of Summer, Silver Linings Playbook, The Big Sick, Lost in Translation (Yes, even the unspoken but obvious love between Bill and Scarlett), and Brokeback Mountain (Yes, even the love between two men).

The Way We Were (6) has to be one of the most painful movies I’ve ever seen.  It was less about love and romance than it was about the way time moves us inexorably along and how true love can only be true and everlasting in fairy tales.  Listen to that set of lyrics: “Memries light the corners of our mind, misty water-color memries of the way we were.  Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind, smiles we gave to one another for the way we were.  Can it be that it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten every line?  If we had the chance to do it all again, tell me, would we?  Could we?  Memries may be beautiful and yet what’s too painful to remember we simply choose to forget.  So it’s the laughter we will remember, whenever we remember the way we were.”  Man, those are some sad words.  I think seeing that movie again would only depress me.  Give me a happy love story like Sleepless in Seattle or Pretty Woman.

Years ago, when I was in Boulder doing post-graduate work, I read The French Lieutenant’s Woman and swore it would be made into an Academy Award-winning movie.  Meryl Streep starred in it and the movie bombed.  The book was one of the most moving stories of found love and I thought the movie was ready-made for the same.  Wrong. But at least I was right about Streep, maybe not as a French Lieutenant’s woman, but certainly as an Academy Award winner.

After this AFI special, I was filled with a desire to go back and see a bunch of them, like The Apartment (62), When Harry Met Sally (25), Jerry Maguire (100), and The Goodbye Girl (81). I think if I had enough years left, I’d go back and see all one hundred of them as well as the ones that didn’t make the grade.