The McCarey Treatment: "An Affair to Remember," "Love Affair," And "Sleepless in Seattle"

Some time after my book Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas’ was pub­lished, my edit­or at Hnover Square Press and I were dis­cuss­ing a fol­lowup, and I thought it would be fun to do some­thing coun­ter­in­tu­it­ive. The 30^th anniversary of the release of Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle was nigh. The movie inter­ested me for a num­ber of reas­ons, not least of them being its links to clas­sic­al Hollywood. Specifically the way the whole plot hinges on that of two pri­or films dir­ec­ted by Leo McCarey. I also had a won­der­ful exper­i­ence with Nick Pileggi, the pat­ri­arch of Goodfellas who had been Ephron’s hus­band until her death in 2012. He thought the pro­ject a good idea, gave me a couple of con­tacts, and stepped aside. He insisted that his and Ephron’s pro­fes­sion­al activ­it­ies had almost no cros­sov­er. (This des­pite Ephron tak­ing enthu­si­ast­ic interest in Nick’s mob-chronicling work, and craft­ing the script of My Blue Heaven around her own per­son­al exper­i­ence of Henry Hill.)

The pro­ject was fun for a little while, and then less fun, and then a bit night­mar­ish. I’m not inclined to detail it here. Well — one thing was that nobody in the cast would speak with me and every behind-the-scenes indi­vidu­al I did inter­view had an axe or two to grind with respect to Ephron. The best part of the pro­cess was inter­view­ing Calvin Trillin, a hero of mine who has a small role in Sleepless, and who said to me, unpromp­ted, about his friend, “Nora was bossy.”

Anyway, At a cer­tain point I gave it up and star­ted work on what has recently been pub­lished as The World Is Yours: The Story of ‘Scarface.’ Fun! 

But I should­n’t let what work I did do on the Sleepless pro­ject go to waste, and I have been neg­lect­ing this poor blog for quite some time (although a new Blu-ray-4K Ultra Consumer Guide is in fact in the works and should be up before the end of August). So I give you my chapter on the McCarey films, keep­ing the brack­eted source cita­tions that would have gone in the back of the actu­al book intact just so you can see how scru­pu­lous I am. 

            One of the most affec­tion­ately cited scenes in Sleepless in Seattle is the one on which it’s the guys’ turn to talk about An Affair to Remember. It may indeed have had an inor­din­ate and not salut­ary effect on main­stream intra­gender movie discourse

            “It’s a chick movie” is how Sam describes it. That’s enough, in his mind, and the mind of his brother-in-law Greg, played by Victor Garber, to dis­miss it entirely. Not in a mali­cious, shoot-it-into-the-sun way; they just would prefer it not sully their con­scious­nesses too much. They’ll sit through such an item if neces­sary — it’s a gen­er­ous ges­ture on date night — but that’s it. After sister-in-law Suzy, played by Rita Wilson, Hanks’ wife in real life, goes through an elab­or­ate, emo­tion­al mono­logue on the heart­break­ing qual­it­ies of Affair — one that we have been primed for by the con­ver­sa­tions between Annie and Becky about the pic­ture — Sam and Greg jok­ingly describe their emo­tion­al responses to mid-60s action block­buster. “I cried at the end of The Dirty Dozen,” Victor Garber’s Greg says of the Robert-Aldrich-directed World War II pic­ture about a sui­cide squad of largely psychot­ic mis­fits, most of whom indeed do buy it by the picture’s end. Tom Hanks’ Sam invokes cast mem­ber Trini Lopez as hav­ing endured a par­tic­u­larly poignant end. Lopez, a pop star who rock­eted to super­star­dom play­ing Latin-tinged fare, was one of two bits of stunt cast­ing in Dozen; the oth­er was record-breaking full­back Jim Brown, who of course was obliged to show off his remark­able running-with-something-in-his-hands skills (in this case a series of gren­ades rather than a foot­ball) for the movie’s thrill­ing climax.

            “Stop it you guys,“ Suzy says after a bit, still sniff­ling. The banter, how­ever, is good natured; not the out-for-blood cul­ture war stuff you see too fre­quently on social media nowadays.

            If you’ve read Nora Ephron’s essays, and seen the movies she made, the cas­u­al allu­sions they con­tain would incline you to believe that weav­ing An Affair to Remember into the nar­rat­ive of Sleepless in Seattle was her idea. I myself was a little sur­prised to learn from Jeff Arch that the device was indeed his, and that it went back to an exper­i­ence he had in his late teens, watch­ing Affair on tele­vi­sion with his girl­friend. The movie, he says, struck him as improb­ably sen­ti­ment­al driv­el through­out. And yet at the end he found him­self reduced to tears. And that’s the dif­fer­ence between Arch and the Sleepless guys: they do not melt at the end of Affair. (Nor, we can con­fid­ently infer, do they cry at the end of The Dirty Dozen.)

            Arch recalls: “I was watch­ing on TV with a girl­friend in col­lege, in 1974. At one point I was just so fed up and I thought this was so hokey. I was cyn­ic­al and I turned to her – I’m a Sagittarius, and we’re known for not know­ing when to shut up. I was about to make the biggest crack about what a crock of shit this thing is, and I saw she was cry­ing like Niagara Falls. One of the few times in my life where I didn’t say the thing I was going to say because I saw the power of that. And then I got kind of into the device — you know, it is a very power­ful struc­tur­ally thing. And then we talked. While we were really close, I had the girl­friend out of town and she had the boy­friend out at a dif­fer­ent col­lege.   And I said to her, “Look, if our lives don’t work out, we’ll meet at the top of the Empire State Building on New Years’ Day of 1980,” which seems — when you’re in 1974 and you’re 19 or 20 years old — like a really, really long time.

            “She said, ‘Sure.’ And we didn’t meet, because things…worked out dif­fer­ently. Then at some point, had an idea to write a play about two people who only speak to each oth­er on the phone for busi­ness, and then even­tu­ally meet. I couldn’t fig­ure out how to do that. I just had this visu­al of their desks on stage start­ing at extreme ends and as the play moved on, their debts were going to move closer. So I had an idea of people fall­ing in love before they met each oth­er, with that pretext.”

            An Affair to Remember, a lush, widescreen and col­or affair made for 20^th Century Fox, is argu­ably a swan song of American romantic cinema, or com­edy, or tra­gi­com­edy. The 1957 movie and its ori­gin­al Love Affair, from 1939, were both con­ceived, co-written and dir­ec­ted by Leo McCarey, a dir­ect­or elev­ated to reas­sess­ment in the 1960s when Andrew Sarris pro­nounced him a “Far Side of Paradise” auteur in The American Cinema: Directors and Direction 1929 to 1968 and Peter Bogdanovich recor­ded an oral his­tory with McCarey for the American Film Institute. McCarey’s movies ran the gamut; he began as a dir­ect­or of Laurel and Hardy com­edy shorts, gave the Marx Brothers their col­lect­ive anarch­ic heads in Duck Soup, waved the flag in a heart­warm­ing and funny fash­ion in Ruggles of Red Gap, made romantic com­edy a little less screw­ball than Howard Hawks did with The Awful Truth.

            An Affair to Remember at least in part exists because of a regret that Cary Grant car­ried with him for a couple of dec­ades. In 1937 Grant worked with dir­ect­or Leo McCarey on the clas­sic screw­ball com­edy The Awful Truth, co-starring with Irene Dunne. Grant’s exper­i­ence was, from his per­spect­ive, less than ideal. McCarey had an impro­visa­tion­al approach that Grant wasn’t used to. He vis­ited the set of the 1939 Love Affair and saw what won­ders the McCarey touch achieved with Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne and pic­tured him­self in the Boyer role.

            On an audio com­ment­ary recor­ded for a DVD edi­tion of Sleepless in Seattle, Nora Ephron says “film snobs think Love Affair is bet­ter than An Affair to Remember but noth­ing to me is as good as Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant.” You can’t call Leo McCarey a film snob, but he too pre­ferred Love Affair to Affair to Remember. Displaying what F. Scott Fitzgerald con­sidered the hall­mark of a first-rate intel­li­gence (that is, the abil­ity to hold two con­tra­dict­ory ideas in one’s head and still retain the abil­ity to func­tion), McCarey also allowed, in his way, that Cary Grant was the ideal star to sell this tale. He had writ­ten the role of Nicky for Charles Boyer, yes. But, as he told Peter Bogdanovich: “Boyer came out much bet­ter than Cary. But Cary meant a lot more at the box office.” One could argue in the case of An Affair To Remember, that this wasn’t merely reflex­ive; watch­ing Love Affair today, there’s a sense in which Boyer’s per­form­ance feels less than con­tem­por­ary, while Grant (pos­sibly in part because his per­sona is still con­sidered and exper­i­enced as archetyp­al) has more endur­ing cred­ib­il­ity. To be more spe­cif­ic, Boyer’s stateli­ness is par­tic­u­larly to per­tin­ent to the reli­gi­os­ity of Love Affair which is largely absent in Affair to Remember and, let’s be frank, would have likely been a turn off to the char­ac­ters in Sleepless.

            McCarey and Grant worked togeth­er again twice after Truth, on the Garson Kanin-directed My Favorite Wife (which McCarey developed, helped write, and was set to dir­ect; an auto­mobile acci­dent put him, accord­ing to second female lead Gail Patrick, “at death’s door,” [James Bawden, Films in Review, 1981] but he remained as pro­du­cer) and Once Upon A Honeymoon.  As much as McCarey and Grant had not got­ten along on Truth, it’s been argued that McCarey, a dap­per dress­er who could be hil­ari­ous and insouci­ant before the film industry and alco­hol­ism stressed him out of shape, helped shape what became known as the Grant per­sona. The con­fid­ence, the swings between under­state­ment and man­ic com­ic indig­na­tion, the style, the walk — all these aspects of what we con­sider the quint­es­sen­tial Grant per­sona are honed to per­fec­tion in Grant’s per­form­ance in The Awful Truth. Director Alfred Hitchcock, whom McCarey is on the record as admir­ing, refined these aspects of Grant’s screen per­son­al­ity even further.

            And except for the clothes sense, appar­ently few if any of the per­son­al­ity traits we see in Grant on screen were mani­fes­ted by Grant in real life. In his some­times acid mem­oir, Dropped Names, Frank Langella recalls din­ing with Tony Curtis, who had idol­ized Grant grow­ing up and even­tu­ally worked with him on Blake Edwards’ 1959 Operation Petticoat. Because it was a “huge hit” Curtis allowed that he would have worked with Grant again any­time, he was aston­ished at the gap between the man and his screen per­sona. “The guy turns out to be a fuck­ing bore,” Langella quotes Curtis. “He knew bet­ter than all of us where to put the cam­era, how to say the line, how to play the scene. He had no humor and no charm. I would do any­thing to avoid hav­ing lunch with him.” Langella had heard sim­il­arly from Mel Brooks. “I thought I’d kill myself if I had to eat a meal with this guy again.”  [Langella pg. 308]

            McCarey respon­ded “Impossible” to Bogdanovich when asked what Grant was like to work with on The Awful Truth. By the same token, at this point in his career, Grant might have con­sidered McCarey sim­il­arly. In the second volume of his bio­graphy of Bing Crosby — whose pub­lic per­sona was humong­ously enhanced by his por­tray­al of kindly but hip priest Father O’Malley in McCarey’s hit Going My Way and its sequel The Bells of Saint Mary’s — Gary Giddins writes: “McCarey’s meth­od of shoot­ing […] deman­ded more con­cen­tra­tion than mem­or­iz­ing a script. Leo’s act­ors related sim­il­ar anec­dotes attest­ing to the mood on his sets. George Burns wrote of W.C. Fields sit­ting by him­self in a corner, learn­ing his lines dur­ing the film­ing of Six of a Kind; he had giv­en up learn­ing them at home the night before after he real­ized they changed every day. Ralph Bellamy groused that on The Awful Truth, nobody but McCarey knew what was going on. On The Milky Way, McCarey acted out for Adolph Menjou a long, illo­gic­al speech he wanted him to deliv­er for his big scene with Harold Lloyd. After he ‘did it for me with all the ges­tures,’ Menjou wrote, McCarey asked, ‘Why not adlib it,’ as it’s all ‘hocus pocus’ any­way? ‘Maybe,’ Leo joked, ‘we’ve dis­covered a new tech­nique…. The McCarey sys­tem, the ulti­mate in the true are of mak­ing motion pic­tures.’ Menjou summed it up: ‘He was kid­ding about the new tech­nique [but] he wasn’t kid­ding about adlib­bing the scene.’” [pg 344, Giddins]

            The set of An Affair To Remember was not so con­fus­ing, in part because Grant and Kerr already had a tem­plate to work from: the ori­gin­al Love Affair. Both films hinge on two sub­stan­tial plot com­pon­ents: the ocean cruise on which the lov­ers, sep­ar­ated from their land-based oblig­a­tions, romantic and oth­er­wise, and locked in a kind of romantic isol­a­tion that’s only enhanced by a vis­it to a ven­er­ated rela­tion, and the pro­posed ren­dez­vous at the Empire State Building.

            These were vis­ions that occurred to McCarey while return­ing from a European vaca­tion with his wife Stella. The time off — they depar­ted from Hollywood in October of 1937 — was well-deserved and much needed. McCarey had not one but two mas­ter­pieces out that year, one being The Awful Truth and the oth­er the heart­break­ing tragedy of old age Make Way For Tomorrow, a still-devastating pic­ture about the inverse of par­ent­al neg­lect of chil­dren that reportedly inspired the Yasuhiro Ozu clas­sic Tokyo Story. McCarey was fond of both pic­tures but held Tomorrow closest to his heart — he was to remark, when accept­ing the Best Director award for Truth in March of 1938, “Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.”

            As much as he needed, and got, some rest and relax­a­tion his trip, on the cruise back to the States some­thing was gnaw­ing at him. And Stella noticed. McCarey recalled to Bogdanovich his wife say­ing, “You’re always at you low­est ebb when you’re try­ing to get a new idea.” [Bog pg 417] After a peri­od of stew­ing, he got the new idea. Here’s how he put it to Stella: “Suppose you and I were talk­ing to each oth­er when the boat sailed from England and we got to know each oth­er on the trip. We felt ourselves insep­ar­able. By the time the trip was over, we were madly in love with each oth­er but by the time the boat docked we have found out that each is oblig­ated to some­body else.” [Bog.pg 417]

            The Empire State Building idea came later. At the end of the cruise, when McCarey looked at the Manhattan sky­line (the same sky­line, minus the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, that inspired Fritz Lang to con­coct Metropolis; Lang’s first sight of it was in 1924). And from there he con­cocted the twist: Terri’s inab­il­ity to make the ren­dez­vous there because of being inca­pa­cit­ated in an auto acci­dent. “I have a the­ory,” McCarey told Bogdanovich, “which I call the ineluct­ab­il­ity of incid­ents. The idea is that if some­thing hap­pens, some oth­er thing inev­it­able flows from it — like night fol­lows day; events are linked togeth­er. I always devel­op my stor­ies that way, in a series of events that suc­ceed and pro­voke each oth­er. I nev­er really have intrigues.” [Bog., pg 416] Terri’s dis­ap­pear­ance is cer­tainly a pro­vok­ing incid­ent. But it’s one that Nicky takes to be an intrigue, freez­ing him — and her — up when they run into each oth­er at a con­cert, before their pain­ful and glor­i­ous redis­cov­ery of each oth­er and reconciliation. 

            With these ideas in place, McCarey fleshed out the story with Mildred Cram, then turned over screen­writ­ing duties to Donald Ogden Stewart (who helped adapt Holiday, the Philip Barry play which George Cukor filmed with Grant and Katharine Hepburn) and Delmar Daves. It would take almost a year for McCarey’s notions to hit a sound­stage: The shoot­ing of the film then titled Love Match com­menced on October 3, 1938. While gos­sip colum­nists repor­ted that the female lead was coveted by act­resses ran­ging from Greta Garbo to Helen Hayes [Gehring, pg. 139] McCarey had,” hand-tailored” for Love Affair his Awful Truth star Irene Dunne, “which included mak­ing her a nightclub enter­tain­er in order that Irene could sing dur­ing the pic­ture.” [Bog pg 417] He did not tail­or Nicky to Cary Grant. Indeed, the ebul­li­ence inher­ent in Dunne not­with­stand­ing, McCarey bio­graph­er Wes D. Gehring sees in the cre­ation of Love Affair McCarey steer­ing to a more overtly and com­pre­hens­ive sin­cer­ity: “Romantic comedy’s one-foot-in-reality-base suited McCarey bet­ter than the ludicrous­ness of screw­ball farce,” he avers.

            The res­ult­ant film was received rhaps­od­ic­ally, and not just by film snobs, either. Gehring cites a char­ac­ter­ist­ic con­tem­por­ary review from Clark Wales of the trade pub­lic­a­tion Screen and Radio Weekly: “Recommending a Leo McCarey pro­duc­tion is some­thing like recom­mend­ing a mil­lion dol­lars or beauty or a long and happy life. Any of these is a very fine thing to have and the only trouble is that there are not enough of them.” While box-office fig­ures are not read­ily avail­able, the movie proved to be the second-most pop­u­lar to be pro­duced and dis­trib­uted by RKO Pictures, the first hav­ing been George Stevens’ Kipling-inspired adven­ture pic­ture Gunga Din, which starred…Cary Grant.

            McCarey’s 1940s were defined by the two block­busters Going My Way and The Bells of Saint Mary’s, after which he made Good Sam, anoth­er fantas­ia of Catholic faith (“Sam,” besides being the name of the lead char­ac­ter played by Gary Cooper, stood for “Samaritan”). It was less well-received and indeed has not been sub­jec­ted to any mean­ing­ful crit­ic­al reas­sess­ment. One can pic­ture McCarey at that low ebb, look­ing for ideas as the 1950s com­menced. Gehring spec­u­lates about the reas­ons for McCarey’s reduced pro­ductiv­ity. Alcoholism, and an increas­ing depend­ence on paink­illers that he began using in the wake of the 1939 auto acci­dent that had taken him out of the director’s chair on My Favorite Wife. McCarey also suffered a ter­rible per­son­al loss in the months after the release of Good Sam: the sui­cide death of his young­er broth­er, Ray, with whom he had been close. And of course there was what film his­tor­i­an Joseph McBride has called (with respect to McCarey’s friend and col­league Frank Capra) “the cata­strophe of suc­cess.” Going My Way and Bells had been such monu­ment­al, zeitgeist-defining hits that McCarey was very pos­sibly torn between the impulse to try to duplic­ate them and the desire to break free of them. Hence, as Gehring puts it, he pur­sued “some very odd unreal­ized film pro­pos­als.” One being a pic­ture about Adam and Eve — he’d privately hatched the idea in the thirties — star­ring Bells female lead Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne. McCarey spent a lot of money on research, and on the tal­ents of song­writer Harry Warren, devel­op­ing a music­al about Marco Polo. He also wanted his friend Alfred Hitchcock to act for him, in a pic­ture in which the Master of Suspense would “get away with the per­fect crime.” [Gehring, pg. 219].

            In any event, his first real­ized pic­ture of the 1950s was 1952’s My Son John, a HUAC-boosting anti-Communist fam­ily melo­drama whose pro­duc­tion was highly incon­veni­enced by the death of lead­ing man Robert Walker pri­or to the end of prin­cip­al pho­to­graphy. McCarey was forced to cobble togeth­er his finale, in which John sees the error of his Red ways, from foot­age in his friend Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and to con­tem­por­ary eyes the hedging and spli­cing is very plain to see, and some­what cringe-inducing. Would the pic­ture have been less so had Walker lived to com­plete his per­form­ance? Difficult to say. To these eyes, John is the movie in which the pat­ri­ot­ism of Ruggles of Red Gap curdles into para­noia. Its my-country-right-or-wrong eth­os is blunt to the point of bathos, and as the crit­ic Robin Wood has poin­ted out, it’s almost com­pletely con­tra­dicted in the late McCarey film Rally Round The Flag, Boys, which just under­scores how impossible it is to expect coher­ent polit­ics out of a lot of clas­sic­al Hollywood film­makers. John got a bit of a shel­lack­ing from the press but was placed in the top ten films of 1952 list by the ever-mysterious National Board of Review, and got an award from the Catholic Institute of the Press because of course it did. Its box office was low.

            1952 was also the year in which rumors of a Love Affair remake began cir­cu­lat­ing: in November of that year, syn­dic­ated colum­nist Joe Hyams repor­ted that Fernando Lamas and Arlene Dahl, who would marry in 1952 (and present the world with future prime time soap sen­sa­tion Lorenzo Lamas four years later) were inter­ested in star­ring in a new ver­sion of the pic­ture. But it was Twentieth Century Fox and Cary Grant who were the motors for the 1957 movie. In his 1984 bio­graphy of Grant, Haunted Idol, Geoffrey Wansell writes that Grant “could still remem­ber vis­it­ing the set of the ori­gin­al to talk with Irene Dunne and wish­ing he had been play­ing in it.”

            In McCarey’s estim­a­tion, Grant went from “impossible” to “ter­rif­ic” in An Affair to Remember. The remake, as was cus­tom­ary from Twentieth Century Fox since its intro­duc­tion of the format in 1953, was in breath­tak­ing widescreen CinemaScope and glor­i­ous DeLuxe Color (this was a one-strip vari­ant of Technicolor, which required three strips of film being exposed at once, in synch with each oth­er). The sound was Westrex ste­reo, show­cas­ing the sump­tu­ous voice of Vic Damone singing the title song, music by Harry Warren and lyr­ics in part by McCarey him­self. This was McCarey’s first time out with col­or and widescreen, and ace cine­ma­to­graph­er Milton Krasner, who’d been work­ing in the CinemaScope format since its begin­nings — lens­ing the melodrama/romantic travelogue Three Coins in the Fountain and the sword-and-sandal Christianity epic Demetrius and the Gladiators (dir­ec­ted, as it hap­pens, by Delmer Daves) prac­tic­ally back to back for 1954 releases — groun­ded the visu­als beau­ti­fully. The tech­nic­al “improve­ments” aside, McCarey saw the remake as an oppor­tun­ity to reach a new audi­ence. He told Bogdanovich, “A lot of people said it was the best love story they ever saw on screen — and it’s also my favor­ite love story. Two dec­ades had passed; a lot of young people couldn’t have seen the first ver­sion, so I felt I should tell the story again — for them.” Prior to shoot­ing the pic­ture, he told the New York Times that con­tem­por­ary Hollywood was “afraid of hon­est emo­tion. It’s con­sidered old-fashioned if a fel­low takes his hat off to kiss a girl. They all seem to be try­ing to find a trick way to say ‘I love you.’ What are they try­ing to prove? Love is the old­est and noblest emo­tion.” (Eventually, when asked to name his favor­ites among his pic­tures, McCarey would reflect, “Well, I guess Make Way For Tomorrow, Love Affair, An Affair to Remember, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary’s. There are moments I like in all the films. I’ve always said, if only I could make a pic­ture out of just the favor­ite moments.”)

            If lead­ing lady Deborah Kerr was hard-pressed to repro­duce the ebul­li­ence of Irene Dunne (and indeed, while Terry remains a sing­er in the remake, she’s an alto­geth­er more sub­dued kind than Dunne — not quite lounge as opposed to nightclub, but cer­tainly more of a nat­ur­al bal­ladeer in atti­tude; her singing voice was dubbed by the per­en­ni­al Marni Nixon), she cer­tainly could sell nobil­ity without break­ing a sweat.

            As for Cary Grant, he was, as he entered his early fifties, argu­ably at his apo­gee as a screen star. If we agree that Affair was his peak as a romantic lead, we can note that in North By Northwest, pro­duced a few years after Affair, rep­res­en­ted his apo­theosis as a Hitchcock lead. These achieve­ments help explain why, for Ephron, Affair was the Hollywood Romantic Film and a super­i­or iter­a­tion of Love Affair. Affair to Remember starred an all-caps Cary Grant. As much as Boyer had been in vogue after Pepe Le Moko and Algiers, he nev­er quite made it to all-caps status. (By 1957 Boyer had moved into sup­port­ing roles in film; see his work as a fath­erly but not quite com­pet­ent san­it­ari­um admin­is­trat­or in Vincente Minnelli’s 1955 The Cobweb. He had also made him­self a tidy sum in tele­vi­sion production.)