Love affairs to remember: Remaking, casting, performance and mise-en-scène’

Crofts, Charlotte

Abstract

An Affair to Remember (dir. Leo McCarey, 1957) is an almost shot for shot remake of McCarey’s Love Affair (1939). Subsequent remakes also borrow very heavily from the original, including Love Affair (dir. Gordon Glenn Caron, 1994) and a Bollywood version, Mann (dir. Indra Kumar, 1999). All four films were included in the online “Love Affairs to Remember Watch-along Marathon” at the Cary Comes Home Festival (2020), which culminated in a post-marathon “cool down” discussion with disabled rights activist Ross Wilcock. This paper will critically reflect on the festival’s curatorial strategies, examining how watching the films in chronological order over one weekend foregrounds the shifting social mores across eras, and cultures in relation to gender, class mobility and the representation of dis/ability. The paper will be illustrated by side-by-side analysis of all four films, plus a side-nod to Sleepless in Seattle (dir. Norah Ephron, 1993), which pays homage to the Cary Grant version. Using videographic techniques, the presentation will draw out different nuances of casting, performance and mise-en-scène, as well as noticing contrasts between aesthetics, from the crisp black and white Academy Ratio of the 1939 version to the breathtaking CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor of the 1957 version.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Screen studies conference, 2022
• Start Date: Jul 1, 2022
• End Date: Jul 3, 2022
• Deposit Date: Jan 5, 2023
• Keywords: Cary Grant; Leo McCarey; Irene Dunne; Love Affair; An Affair to Remember; Remakes
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/10289833