Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 12, 1993 TAG: 9302120333
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: LUAINE LEE KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
ROMANTIC SURVEY OF THE MOVIES
In spite of what they claim, movies do more than entertain. They inflame, influence and inform.And when it comes to romance, nobody does it better. A speedy countdown of the best romantic movies of the past can leave one breathless. Once you start clicking them off, it's like trying to eat one potato chip.
So in honor of Valentine's Day, here's a personal view of the most romantic movies of all time:
"Gone With the Wind": The unanimous choice of most people, this David O. Selznick film boasts everything - scope, passion, deprivation and triumph. All of the breadth of Margaret Mitchell's novel is captured in this 1939 classic. Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler are personified by Viven Leigh and Clark Gable as the lovers whose characters work against them. When Gable says, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," he's saying it for every human who has ever been hopelessly in love with the wrong person.
"Casablanca": The second most popular choice of both film critics and non-critics alike. Here the lovers, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, are caught up in the maelstrom of World War II, losing touch and finding each other again - only to face the inevitability of their dissolution. Oiled by the peerless dialogue of the Epstein twins, this 1942 movie continues to enrapture viewers 50 years later.
"Doctor Zhivago": Here again we have the sweep of war and suffering as the two lovers (Julie Christie and Omar Sharif) squeeze their small allotment of joy into a tiny pocket of their lives. Director David Lean has wrestled Boris Pasternak's novel into an elegantly beautiful and memorable parade of scenes that shimmer in the memory. Lean has managed both the universal and the particular in this 1965 film as he paints living portraits framed against Russia's political chaos.
"The Way We Were": With this 1973 Sydney Pollack film, we have the sorrow of two people who try their very best and find it's just not good enough. Barbra Streisand, the semi-homely campus firebrand, falls madly in love with golden-boy BMOC Robert Redford. Surviving social changes from the '30s to the '50s, the couple almost subjugate their differences enough to live together in harmony. But not quite. In the end they meet again after many years, emotionally unchanged but now aware of the loss they've suffered. That last scene is one of the most heartbreaking ever captured on film.
"Harold and Maude": Here we go beyond boy-girl, kiss-kiss romance into a love of a different kind. Hal Ashby's thoroughly quirky film tells the tale of a morose and suicidal 20-year-old (Bud Cort) and his relationship with an octogenarian of prodigiously buoyant spirit (Ruth Gordon). Maude, who faces death with the grace and joy that she has afforded life, can teach us all something about measuring our moments. This 1972 black comedy skates over the serious theme with a frieze of hilarious set-pieces. Who can forget Harold's theatrical self-immolation seen through the window as his mother (the wonderful Vivian Pickles) interviews the latest in a series of vacuous dates she plans for her son?
"Wuthering Heights": For sheer, unadulterated romance there is probably no motion picture to compare with the 1939 version of "Wuthering Heights." Adapted from Emily Bronte's pre-Victorian novel and filmed in visionary black and white by Oscar-winning Gregg Toland, the movie retells the ill-fated tale of the middle class Cathy and the gypsy Heathcliff she grow to love beyond all reason.
"Room at the Top": If flourish is the trademark for "Wuthering Heights," subtlety marks Jack Clayton's film about the ambitious bloke in the industrial north of England who sacrifices the older woman he loves for the chance to rise in the ranks. Laurence Harvey leaves Simone Signoret, the brow-beaten wife of a petty bureaucrat, for the empty-headed boss' daughter (Heather Sears).