An Affair to Remember

The mess that religious piety makes of carnal passion bursts uproariously onto the screen in Leo McCarey’s worldly wise yet heaven-drunk love story, from 1957. Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr meet cute aboard a New York-bound ocean liner; he’s an international playboy, and she’s a scuffling chanteuse. Both are engaged to people with money, but they instantly fall into the rhythm of graceful banter that reflects deep affinity, and they vow to end their prior commitments and marry. McCarey plays the shipboard courtship for generous and tender laughs—the wryly staged first kiss is one of the sweetest in all cinema—but the comedy that follows on dry land is mostly inadvertent. The Empire State Building, the pair’s intended meeting place, comes off as a phallic cathedral, and the obstacles that fate throws in their way—as if in retribution for the sins of betrayal, lust, and hope for celestial happiness on Earth—are riotously cartoonish but provoke no change in directorial tone. The suddenly sanitized tale lurches toward the finish with an all-time howler of a last line. (MOMA, May 25, and streaming)