TCM Greatest Classic Films: Romance (4FE) (DVD)

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Love in the Afternoon

Fairy-tale Paris doesn’t get more enchanting than Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon, an ode to picnics on the grass and champagne at the Ritz. Audrey Hepburn (who had already made Sabrina with Wilder) is at her best as the inexperienced cellist with a fascination for millionaire American playboy Gary Cooper. Maurice Chevalier (who else?) is Hepburn’s father, a private detective with ample evidence of Cooper’s crowded history of l’amour. Alongside the sheen of the romance is Wilder’s unerring sense of craftsmanship; watch how inanimate objects such as a liquor tray, a white carnation, or the little dog in the suite next door are developed into sublime running gags. The age difference between the two leads has often been questioned, but perhaps this is what gives the gossamer material the whiff of welcome melancholy. The final three minutes leave no doubt that Wilder hatched the best endings in Hollywood history. –Robert Horton

Mogambo

This remake of the 1932 Red Dust is famous for using the very same romantic leading man–21 years after the fact. But when that leading man is Clark Gable, what’s a little gray hair in the temples? Gable was certainly still the great strutting rooster of American movies in 1953, when Mogambo made him a safari guide juggling two much younger women. First up is good-time girl Ava Gardner, who’s game for a little harmless romp with Gable after she gets stood up by a playboy in the African jungle. But when Grace Kelly–the proper wife of a visiting anthropologist (Donald Sinden)–arrives on the scene, a new affair begins. The location shooting is much in the vein of King Solomon’s Mines, although the story is much more intimate. This feels like a bit of a holiday for Hollywood’s top director, John Ford, and not one of his most committed pictures. Still, Ford’s unparalleled eye for backlit exteriors and for the way people move around in rooms is on display, even when the script wobbles. People always joke about Gable being too old for this movie, but that doesn’t take into account his durable movie-star appeal–he certainly looks every inch the Hemingwayesque hunter, and it’s not that big a stretch to imagine Gardner or Kelly in the clinches with him. Indeed, he and Grace Kelly had an offscreen affair during shooting, graying temples or not. –Robert Horton

Product Description

TCM Greatest Classic Films: Romance (4FE) (DVD)
SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS – Two teenagers (Natalie Wood and screen-debuting Warren Beatty) find their intense feelings for each other put them at odds with their families and the rigid respectability of their 1920s Kansas town. Elia Kazan directs a poetic portrait of young love from an Oscar®-winning* William Inge screenplay. LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON – May-December romance is in bloom when music student Audrey Hepburn and millionaireplayboy Gary Cooper cross paths. Laughs, Parisian settings, champagne elegance – director/co-writer Billy Wilder delivers them all in a soufflé-light comedy charmer also starring Maurice Chevalier. MOGAMBO – In the jungles of Kenya, safari guide Clark Gable is attracted to two beautiful women: a tough out-of-work showgirl (Ava Gardner) and the prim wife (Grace Kelly) of his anthropologist boss. John Ford directs this on-location remake of Red Dust that captured Oscar® nominations* for both ladies. NOW, VOYAGER – A tender love story, a taut psychological drama, an inspiring tale of physical and spiritual transformation. Experience all three in this Bette Davis career milestone, as she magically plays a spinster who defies her domineering mother to discover love, heartbreak and eventual contentment. ]]>