In the tropes of both life and cinema, it is touted that true love means not only never having to say you’re sorry, but also accepting all of your would-be significant other’s flaws, both physical and emotional. Though it’s hard to know which aspect might be more difficult to accept: a Quasimodo aesthetic or a Jack Torrance mind (or worse, and in many cases, both). In the 1950s, of course, it was still expected that, between the two genders, a woman ought to be the more embracing of perceived defects in her potential “partner” (though that word implies equality, a concept that still doesn’t really exist even in the “modern” world). To this point, An Affair to Remember, released in 1957, and frequently deemed one of the great onscreen romances, iterates the notion that you should never, as a female, under any circumstances show any kind of weakness–least of all physical imperfections–to a man.
Though Terry McKay (Deborah Kerr) is a prim wet dream to someone like Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant)–no relation to Elena–who encounters her on the boat from Europe back to New York, she eventually loses a certain cachet of, shall we say, mobility thanks to the curse of being in love and resultantly frantic to get back to that love. That both parties are engaged to others further complicates the matter of their SS Constitution courtship, which both of them do their best to pass off as mere friendship–to each other and their fellow easily scandalized passengers (naturally, despite the analog times, plenty of pictures manage to be taken of the two “canoodling,” to use a Hedda Hopper turn of phrase). Of course, once Nickie involves his sweet old French grandmother, Terry can’t deny that he’s made her good girl’s panties wet. Inviting her to stop with him at Villefranche-sur-Mer, the bougie locale on the French Riviera where his grandma lives, Terry falls further down the rabbit hole of letting her affections for Nickie get the better of her despite being affianced to another well-to-do sort named Kenneth Bradley (Richard Denning)–kind enough to pluck her from the obscurity of being a lounge singer, even though singing is her passion and lifelong dream and not something she wants to give up for the sake of being “respectable,” ergo “wifely.”
Nickie, too, had dreams of the artistic bent, as his grandma, Janou (Cathleen Nesbitt), informs Terry, explaining that he’s a wonderful painter, but too self-critical, destroying everything he creates for lack of being satisfied by the final product. And then there is the fact that he is wary of the idea of making it into a “product” for consumption in the first place, aware that it taints the original intent behind what spurred him to pick up a paintbrush in the first place.
And so, here, during these very calculated scenes of the early second act, it is made clear that for a man to be emotionally damaged is endearing. Should be seen as a worthwhile challenge for a female to take on and surmount–even help to remedy with her so-called “woman’s touch.” Conversely, Terry is alluring and desirably to Nickie precisely because of how “durably” she comes across. Not overly fragile, or worse, “old” like his present fiancée, Lois Clark (Neva Patterson), Terry represents the “ideal woman” with her soft-spoken malleability posing as “moxie” that can be easily quelled with the simple suggestion of a rendezvous on the Empire State Building (which anyone can tell you offers zero eminence if it’s an ambience of romance one is seeking to achieve) in six months’ time, once they’ve gotten their “affairs in order” a.k.a. Nickie does his best to try harder at not relying on the lifestyle of a kept man.
A remake of Leo McCarey’s even more generically named Love Affair (released in 1939), starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, the same tenet exists in his reincarnated, more popular version (also co-written, once again, by Delmer Daves and Donald Ogden Stewart): do not display any form of disfigurement to the one you love. The best thing to do is to force them to experience what life is like without you long enough for them to get so desperate that they’re willing to welcome any deformity, physical or otherwise, upon encountering you again. And even that’s a huge gamble of a strategy considering all the distractions available on various apps du moment. But in the mid-twentieth century, it was still a seemingly viable tactic for the newly paraplegic set.
