Love Affair (1939) on Netflix
On an Atlantic crossing, French painter Michel Marnet and American singer Terry McKay fall for each other, though both are engaged to someone else. They agree to meet again six months later.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.3/107,352 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
Michel Marnet, a French painter with a reputation as a womanizer, meets Terry McKay, an American singer, during a December voyage across the Atlantic. He is engaged to the heiress Lois Clarke and she to Kenneth Bradley, but the two are drawn to each other and share meals on board. Because his fame as a womanizer makes them feel watched by the other passengers, they agree to keep apart and eat at separate tables. When the liner calls at Madeira, they visit Janou, Michel's grandmother, who takes to Terry and says she would like her grandson to settle down. Before the ship reaches New York, Michel and Terry promise each other a reunion six months later, on the roof of the Empire State Building.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Love Affair (1939)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The Production Code Administration rejected the initial screenplay of Love Affair, accusing it of endorsing adultery, and the story was reworked so that Terry McKay's paralysis became her punishment while Michel Marnet was granted redemption.- Delays and rewrites during production caused the 1939 Love Affair to go over its budget of $800,000 by about $600,000.
- Helen Hayes and Greta Garbo showed interest in the female lead, but Leo McCarey and his wife preferred Irene Dunne, a close family friend who had starred in McCarey's earlier The Awful Truth; the nightclub-singer part was meant to display her singing.
- Charles Boyer turned down Harry Cohn's offer of the lead in Good Girls Go to Paris to make Love Affair instead, canceling many acting plans for the rest of 1938 because he thought Leo McCarey was an underrated director.
- Love Affair began as a period piece set in the 1850s about a French ambassador; after the French embassy objected to a French diplomat having an affair with an American woman amid fears of war in Europe, Leo McCarey and Delmer Daves rewrote it as a modern story.
- Leo McCarey let Irene Dunne choose the film's signature song; she picked "Wishing", which became one of the most popular songs of 1939, and the orphans' singing was dubbed by Robert Mitchell's Boys Choir.
- Leo McCarey's 1957 remake An Affair to Remember became better known than the original, placing fifth on AFI's 100 Passions list, and Nora Ephron's heavy references to it in Sleepless in Seattle allegedly increased its rentals, leaving Love Affair lost in time.
- Love Affair entered the public domain in the United States in 1967 because the rights holders did not renew its copyright registration in the 28th year after publication, making it widely available on home video and online.
