There is absolutely no point in having your own little column unless on occasion you can use it to manipulate the market: thus the following.
I recently asked in my local DVD outlet - what can DVD possibly stand for, and how did any brand-manager permit it? - for a copy of An Affair to Remember. Far from having it, they had never even heard of it.
This is like never having heard of Hamlet or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or a Bentley Continental or The Importance of Being Earnest or the Beatles or Leonardo.
For An Affair to Remember is film at its most filmic: disbelief is not so much suspended as despatched into earth orbit by the cinematic witchcraft of one of the great masters of the medium, Leo McCarey.
I have never met anyone called McCarey, and I suspect it is a confection-in-exile, rather like McMurphy and McSullivan. It barely matters, for Leo was a film-making genius. He directed some of the best Laurel and Hardy movies, as well as the most brilliant Marx brothers film Duck Soup.
But primarily, he was the master plucker of heartstrings, as he proved in that sumptuous display of sentimentality which is Going My Way starring Bing Crosby. There is not a more extravagant example of maudlin excess in all of cinema than when the elderly priest, Barry Fitzgerald, is finally reunited with his unbelievably ancient mother, almost in a mummy's shroud, whom Crosby has brought over from Ireland as a surprise. Despite this grand guignol in glucose, the film was a box-office triumph, and was followed by the even more successful The Bells of St Mary's.
If you read Time Out or Halliwell's film guides, they will generally sneer at McCarey and his works, because their compilers are cineastes who think that cinema is primarily a cerebral art-form. Yet that most intellectual of film-makers, Jean Renoir, said: "Leo McCarey is one of the few directors in Hollywood who understands human beings." The need for a love story is universal, and Leo McCarey produced the almost perfect filmic jewel within the genre in Love Affair starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunn. Yet although it was a critical and commercial triumph, he remade it 17 years later, this time with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.
This is insanity, the equivalent of the original directors remaking the 1988 films Die Hard, The Last Emperor or Rainman today. Yet far from not working, An Affair to Remember is of the great Hollywood movies, and a truly brilliant exercise in audience manipulation.
Cary Grant is cast as a playboy who meets Deborah Kerr on a transatlantic liner, and the usual shipboard romance follows. He was 53 when the film was made, and she was 17 years younger - a not impossible gap, but for the purposes of filmic romance a pretty large one. During a break in the cruise, they go to visit Cary Grant's grandmother, played by Cathleen Nesbitt. But she was only 16 years older than Grant, and would have had a hard time playing his mother, never mind his grandmother.
In other words, we are expected to believe that the character whom Cary Grant is playing is a generation younger than the actor himself - yet the film manages to meet and match that implausible requirement. Film-maker and film audience agree on a contract to overlook the inconvenient. And why wouldn't you, in order to include the greatest film star of all time, even if he never won an Oscar for a film role?
An Affair to Remember - AA2R - was shot in Eastmancolor, which is not as garish as Technicolor, but it nonetheless adds a level of chromic unreality to the proceedings - which of course, is actually central to the film. For true film is not realistic. It indulges itself in filmic culture, in tight cutting, sumptuous settings, sharp one-liners, and music - the fairly appalling theme song exists only within the film: as a romantic ballad in its own terms, it is valueless, as its modest two weeks in the 1957 British charts (reaching just 29) suggest.
The passionate affair is followed by a trial separation, with an appointment on the top of the Empire State Building on a certain date if both are interested in renewing the relationship. He turns up. She doesn't.
And now the heart-ache begins. . .
I have seen AA2R a dozen times on television. Girls, I have wept every time. Why not? I believe an appeal to sentimentality to be an entirely justified and emotionally rewarding dramatic technique. In the US, where they are less snobbish about sentimentality than Europeans, AA2R is a cult classic, and is the leitmotif for Sleepless in Seattle (the primary virtue of which is to show how superior both McCarey films were).
"Guys just don't get this movie," says one of the female characters in Sleepless as they watch AA2R. Well, this one does. Which might mean that I am a closet homosexual/transsexual/hermaphrodite in need of some surgery and counselling: so be it. I am also in urgent need of a good cry, but AA2R is never on television, and I yearn to see it again. And the only way DVD outlets will stock is if there is a demand for it.
Men generally are heartless brutes, so there's no point in asking them to do the necessary. This request is thus addressed to my she-readers only; storm your local DVD outlet now, threatening to set it on fire unless it immediately stocks An Affair to Remember. Then reach for the Kleenex. . .