It’s hard not to notice how many of these movies end unhappily, with the lovers apart. This holds true for the rest of the list, too. Given Hollywood’s obsession with happy endings for the past 25 years, this makes you pause. Romantically inclined audiences clearly prefer misery to matrimony: mega-hit “Spider-Man” seals the deal.
Everybody will want to take issue with a list like this. Why, for example, are No. 16 “Singin’ in the Rain” and No. 84 “Double Indemnity”-great as they are–even eligible in this category? But my point is not to quibble with the taste of the AFI voters (though I’d be happy to). The bigger problem with the list is how narrowly it defines love. Only the most conventional notions of man-woman love make the grade. Almost always the lovers are unmarried, and the man is older or the same age as the woman. With the exception of No. 24 “King Kong” (bestiality) and No. 69, the absurdist comedy “Harold and Maude” (very old woman, very young man), the selections reveal both how monolithic Hollywood’s imagination has been and how unadventurous the selection committee has been. Let’s see if we can’t broaden the horizons a bit. Here is a list of 10 English-language love stories that explore aspects of l’amour that don’t show up in “100 Passions.”
- MARRIED LOVE
There’s not a movie on the list that shows you a married couple whose relationship you could possibly want to emulate (No. 89 “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Don’t think so). For me, the most enticing marriage ever put on screen is that between Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) in “The Thin Man” (1934). Have husband and wife ever had so much fun together? Their playful, adoring, witty relationship was the epitome of Thirties sophistication, a mating of high society chic and populist street smarts. In their first scene together, Loy meets Charles in a bar, where he is five martinis ahead of her in mid-afternoon. Feeling left out, she plays catch up, lining up six of them on the table all for herself. Back then, they were called bon vivants. Today, they’d be in a twelve step program.
- PUPPY LOVE
The AFI list skews very old. It’s hard to find even teenage lovers (like Romeo and Juliet) on it. And what about those two wonderful 13-year-olds in George Roy Hill’s “A Little Romance?” The unforgettable Diane Lane as a brainy American expat’s daughter in Paris and Thelonious Bernard as a French taxi driver’s son made for the most intoxicating adolescent lovers of their time. This 1979 release made most adult love stories look shabby by comparison.
- BISEXUAL LOVE
Another category utterly ignored. The most sophisticated love story of 1971 was “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” In this John Schlesinger movie, written by Penelope Gilliatt, both Peter Finch and Glenda Jackson fall in love with a handsome younger man played by Murray Head, who is happy to return both their affections. The movie didn’t make a big fuss about its groundbreaking nature: its tone of civilized melancholy was utterly matter-of-fact. Finch’s performance as a middle-aged Jewish doctor may be his greatest work on screen. Schlesinger also directed the popular platonic male love story “Midnight Cowboy,” an Oscar-winner that also didn’t make it onto the top 100.
- OLDER WOMAN/YOUNGER MAN
“Harold and Maude” notwithstanding, this rich category is seriously underrepresented. Hollywood has a shameful history when it comes to age disparate relationships: while older man/younger women love stories are a dime a hundred, when an older woman gets lusty for a young guy she’s usually demonized or made the butt of a cruel joke. But not in the moving, sexy English movie “Room at the Top” (1959), in which a social-climbing young man (Laurence Harvey) gets distracted from his upwardly mobile course by falling in love with a worldly wise French woman many years his senior. This was the movie that made Simone Signoret an international star, and an eternal symbol of the mature sensual woman. I know I’m cheating by putting both this and “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” on the list-only American movies are allowed by the AFI. Maybe that tells you something about how sexually monochromatic Hollywood has tended to be.
- OLD FOLKS LOVE
OK, “On Golden Pond” weighs in at No. 22. It’s hard to resist Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda together. But there is an even more heartbreaking example of the septuagenarian love story in Leo McCarey’s 1937 classic “Make Way for Tomorrow,” in which Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi play an old couple down on their financial luck. In spite of their deep love for each other, they must separate, so as not to be a burden on their children. A deeply poignant love story that explores, with great nuance, a subject Hollywood almost always ignores.
- TALL WOMEN, SHORT MEN
Granted, this is not a burning issue in the romantic lexicon, but it gives me an opportunity to mention a neglected little gem whose quirky romantic chemistry is worth savoring. The movie is 1979’s “Agatha,” directed by Michael Apted. It’s a fiction based on a period in the life of mystery writer Agatha Christie when she mysteriously disappeared. Christie is played, wonderfully, by the statuesque Vanessa Redgrave. Her unlikely romantic partner is the decidedly compact Dustin Hoffman, playing an American journalist whose professional pursuit of the writer becomes an amorous one as well. This charming movie’s most memorable moment is the couples first kiss, in a doorway. For their lips to meet, Redgrave has to bend her head far over and Hoffman must crane back his neck to look heavenward. Instead of hiding the size discrepancy, the Hollywood norm, Apted accentuates it, transforming awkwardness into movie magic.
- UNREQUITED HOMOSEXUAL LOVE
I haven’t seen the list of movies from which the voters were asked to pick their favorite 100 (usually the AFI offers 500 choices, and allows for a few write-ins) but the total absence of any same-sex romances in the final tally makes me wonder if any were even proposed. One of the most fascinating, and elegantly executed examples of a (gay) man pining in vain for a (straight) man is in independent filmmaker Christopher Munch’s one-hour, black and white 1991 masterpiece “The Hours and Times.” This is a fictional film, but the two men in question are real: the movie is based on a trip to Barcelona taken by John Lennon and Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1963. Lennon is well-aware of Epstein’s adoration, and their dance of seduction, desire and denial is mapped by Munch with witty and devastating exactitude.
- AMBIVALENT LOVE
In real life, of course, people spend as much time resisting the urge to love as they do giving into it. This tug of war is territory novelists have explored brilliantly; Hollywood, on the other hand, isn’t fond of “A” words like ambiguity or ambivalence. One notable exception is James. L. Brooks, whose 1987 “Broadcast News” broke many of the romantic comedy rules. Holly Hunter, as a neurotic TV news producer falls in love-sort of-with handsome, shallow anchorman William Hurt, and her attraction to him is at war with her contempt for what he stands for. A delicious, and very modern, love story.
- INTERSPECIES LOVE
In John Carpenter’s touching science fiction fantasy “Starman,” Jeff Bridges is an alien who gets grieving widow Karen Allen to drive him across country to find the spaceship that will take him home. To “pass” on Earth, he takes the form of her recently departed husband. She can’t help but fall in love. Complications, as they say, ensue. Horror specialist Carpenter’s never been known for his romantic touch, but he struck gold with Bridges and Allen, who have a wonderfully natural and sexy chemistry together. The beautiful Jack Nitzsche score doesn’t hurt.
- A FORGOTTEN FILM
How’s this for a tearjerking premise? On an ocean liner a man and a woman fall madly in love. He’s a convicted criminal facing a life sentence when he gets off the boat. She’s a beauty dying of fatal illness. Both conceal the truth from each other, and vow to meet in a year for a toast in a bar in Mexico. This is the wonderfully preposterous set up of a 1932 Hollywood movie called “One Way Passage,” starring Kay Francis and William Powell, directed by Tay Garnett. (It was remade in the ’40s as “Till We Meet Again”). I saw this movie on TV when I was a kid, and its otherworldly final scene has stuck in my mind forever. I include it on the list not because it explores new territory (it’s a quintessential Hollywood doomed romance), but because it’s a perfect AFI movie that time forgot-and it deserves to be remembered. Like the shamelessly entertaining No. 23, “Now, Voyager,” it’s a great kitsch wallow. This vintage movie is just another reminder that when it comes to movie romance, there’s nothing more satisfying than a broken heart. That’s the way we were then, and 60 years down the road, we still like our shipboard romances titanically tragic.
