K and I watched Love Story last night (research purposes–that’s a tale for another time). Given that it’s such a simple story we both hoped it would hold up, despite being released 41 years ago.
The first non-modern thing I noticed, as we open on the snowy campus of Harvard, is how…dirty it all looked. A snowy field in any 21st C film would have been groomed to perfection, whiter than white. This looked realistic: cold and unpleasant as opposed to magical. (Later, the hospital corridors looked similarly dingy.) Then–and this is hard to miss–Ali McGraw can’t act. Her dialogue is wooden–when it’s not being robotic; I wondered, for a few minutes, if she was trying to play someone on the autism spectrum. When she’s not talking, her physical acting, her body language, is believable. But sadly she talks a lot. What were the producers thinking? Different times. Speaking of which, on the street, the men wear hats. This is a film made in my lifetime and the men wear hats. It made me realise just how long I’ve been on the planet. Exceedingly strange.
Ray Milland adds a touch of gravitas but his presence is essentially pointless. We could have lost all those Daddy-issues (I’m so very tired of Hollywood’s daddy issues), lost all that fuss about money, and the plot would be untouched. I did like the character of Jennifer’s dad, Phil, though. I’d forgotten how well played that was.
I think the lovers-gambolling-in-the-snow might have been the first of those now de rigueur acting-childish-outdoors-so-we-know-they’re-in-love montages. It was very slow (97 mins which I think I might have cut to something like 85). And the soundtrack is thin and tinny, except when it swells for those reach-for-the-hanky moments.
Which brings me to my point. Love Story is a classic weepie. That’s its purpose. When the audience doesn’t weep, the film fails. Love Story, then, has a very narrow audience. When I first saw this film I was 12 or 13, sitting in the lounge with Mum and two sisters, eating chocolates. They started to weep about twenty minutes from the end. I sat there squirming, thinking, Oh, just die! Then we can switch the channel to Star Trek! I thought my family were weird and alien. I thought the film ridiculous. I knew a thing or two about death at this point, and, sigh, a lot about hospitals, but I knew nothing, zero, of romantic lurve. It may as well have been a film about Martians speaking Urdu for all the sense it made to me.
I saw it again when I was 16, after I’d fallen head over heels with my first lover, Una. I wept helplessly, hopelessly. I gushed like a drain. It all felt so relevant. So true. So tragic.
Now, frankly, I’m back to the, Oh, just die already, then we can watch the DVD of Babylon 5! Which, yep, I haven’t seen for ages and am looking forward to very much. I wonder how it will hold up…
Nicola Griffith 
The ice skating scene with her face superimposed on him whizzing around is classically dreadful. I had never seen and watched an anniversary edition a couple years and the director referred specifically to that part. He considered the sledghammer symbolism of that double exposure to be a triumph. The chalky white makeup in the hospital scene is pretty funny also.
To put it in even more perspective: it was an Oscar nominee for Best Picture that year. Agghhh! (As I recall, the winner that year was “Tora Tora Tora” about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.)
I attended Ali McGraw's alma mater (Wellesley College), but even so, I still never thought she could act. Gah!
I watched it with a friend in middle school. I haven't seen it since because I thought it was overdone.
Oops, way wrong about that. “Patton” took the 1970 Oscar for Best Picture (one of 6 Oscars it took out of 10 nominations.) (“Love Story” got 7 nominations, but won only for best original musical score.)
I sobbed. I confess — I loved that movie. Haven't seen it in decades, but I suspect I would still like it.
You probably can't see it, but in my younger skinnier days, people often told me I looked like Ali M.
Because of this movie, Cornell plays the music from “Love Story” anytime the Big Red take the ice against Harvard on Lynah Rink to remind them that they got beat. Harvard sucks anyway…go Big Red!
Ew. Love Story's finest moment comes when it's being mocked in What's Up, Doc?, imnsho.
Seeing that awful movie was to me a truly fascinating experience, now that you mention it. And an occasion for cultural insight, I suppose. This is how it went.
Back when it was still playing in Stockholm, I suppose in its second or third year, a friend in the south of Sweden asked me to guide a pen pal of his from Japan, and her fried, around town for a couple of days when they arrived from Helsinki. So I met these two women, who were extremely both self-sufficient and modern, having accepted, they said, to be rejected by their families for deciding to travel on their own around the world. And there were two things they wanted to do in Stockholm: see the recently recovered wreck of the warship Wasa, which had sunk on being launched in 1628, and see “Love Story”, which they hadn't been able to do in Tokyo, they said, because people were being trampled in line for it.
So we saw “Love Story”, and they both wept profusely, and afterwards one of them said, “It's the most tragic film I've ever seen”, and stupidly I asked, “Really, why?”, and she said, “Because she died first.”
And that really got me. Because, it turned out, if only Ryan O'Neal had died first, Ali McGraw could have honorably committed suicide, and the film would have ended happily. But since a male could not kill himself because of a woman without losing face, O'Neal was condemned to a life of misery, and so the film turned into a hopeless tragedy.
If nothing else, at least it made me disgusted at honors cultures long before the term got into the daily news.