DVD Review

Title: TCM – Greatest Classic Films Collection - Romance

Includes: Splendor In The Grass/Love In The Afternoon/Mogambo/Now,Voyager

Studio: Warner

Directors: John Ford, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, Irving Rapper

Principle Cast: Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Maurie Chevalier, Ava Gardner, Clark Gable, Grace Kelly, Bette Davis, Warren Beatty & Natalie Wood

Length: Splendor In The Grass Color/124mins, Love In The Afternoon B&W/130mins, Mogambo Color/116mins, Now Voyager B&W/118mins

Release Date: February 2, 2010

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey

What an ideal collection of classic Romance films! All in the collection are dramas and have the most exceptional collective of stars – Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Eva Gardner, Bette Davis, Warren Beatty and Clark Gable to name but a few. They will keep your heart a-flutter in this collection of films to fit anyone's needs.

Love In The Afternoon (1957) – Starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier, this is a May-December relationship set in the most romantic city in the world - Paris. Chevalier is a private eye who has the most business when a certain American millionaire playboy comes into town and woos a number of married and unmarried women. Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) is about to be on the receiving end of a scorned husband with a grudge and a gun, when Ariane Chavasse (Audrey Hepburn), the detective's daughter, intercepts the violence. She sneaks into Flannagan's hotel suite and takes the place of the gentleman’s wife, who has artfully crept around the window ledge to the room next door and escaped without harm. The film makes this a very light-hearted exchange and it is just the build up to a unique relationship between a playboy and the young woman who may have figured out how to pin him down.

Cooper was in his 50's when this film was made and Hepburn in her 20's, but they both shine on screen and have a lot of playful chemistry. The added bonus to this film is the sensational ending. Love In The Afternoon was written and directed by Billy Wilder (The Apartment, Irma La Deuce), and the combination of the two leads and a clear vision behind the camera makes this film endearing, romantic and full of charm.

Mogambo (1953) – Set in Kenya, this dynamic film has a strong masculine edge to it as Clark Gable plays a safari guide who traps both animals and the hearts of every woman who walks in his path. A three-way love triangle emerges as stranded unemployed showgirl, played by the steel-eyed beauty Ava Gardner, falls in love with Victor (Gable), but he has his heart set on the anthropologists wife recently arrived, played by Grace Kelly. Gardner’s character gets acerbic as Gable and Kelly perform a “mental striptease” as she phrases it, in an unspoken passion all too plain to see. Mogambo, directed by John Ford (The Quiet Man, How The West Was Won), is a little slower paced and a much more complex tale of love, but well worth viewing. Ava Gardner shines in this film (and earned her only Oscar nomination for this performance), even though this would be the film that would launch Grace Kelly to super-stardom.

Now, Voyager (1942) – Bette Davis has an outstanding performance in Now, Voyager, one of the eleven film roles she was nominated for at the Academy Awards. Spinster Charlotte Vale, unwanted daughter, lives under her mother’s thumb. Her mother has decided Charlotte owes her a great debt for being a 'late baby' and must play nurse maid to her controlling mother’s whims. On the brink of a nervous breakdown, Charlotte’s sister recommends she meet Dr. Jaquith, a psychiatrist that has a “healing center”, which he recommends Charlotte to stay at. Like an ugly duckling transformed into a swan, Dr. Jaquith’s treatment allows Charlotte to get away from her mother and go on a tourist boat trip. Charlotte meets Jerry Durrance, a married man on a business trip. The two fall madly in love and decide that the affair must end as the boat docks. Jerry must go back to his unhappy marriage and Charlotte must go back to facing her mother and standing up for her independence. They say “love will find a way”, and one evening the two have a chance meeting at a dinner party, leading to a series of unusual events that helps their relationship mature and graduate to love everlasting.

Love In The Afternoon was my favourite of this collection, but Now, Voyager had to be a very close second as Bette Davis, playing an emotionally frail woman striving to know her own mind and heart, is convincing. At points in Now, Voyager I found myself cheering on Charlotte’s steps towards personal growth and happiness. Paul Henreid (Casablanca) does a fantastic job of playing opposite Davis as the love interest who is completely smitten with her and wants to help her grow as a person as opposed to sweep her off her feet and make her lose her independence all over again. The supporting cast is outstanding and all the performances in this film are exceptional.

Splendor In the Grass (1961) – Teen angst never looked so good with Splendor In The Grass. Warren Betty plays Bud Stamper a young son of a wealthy oil-man in Kansas who wants his son to have a Yale education and stay away from falling in love and marrying young. Deanie Loomis, played by Natalie Wood, is Bud’s long-time girlfriend who is from a considerably poorer family, but the two seem like a perfect pairing. In high school with hormones raging, Bud wants to have a sexual relationship and is frustrated by Deanie’s good girl ethics. Deanie wants to sleep with Bud but does not want to go against her parents wishes and disgrace the family. Eventually Bud finds another girl to fulfil his needs and as Bud goes off to Yale for an education, Deanie is sent to an asylum to “get better” from her suicidal ways. Splendor In The Grass takes teenage love and sexual frustration to a whole new level and highly showcases the inability of youths to deal with the highly charged emotions of love and sexuality. Elia Kazan (One The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire) directs perhaps my least favourite film of this collection, but I am still glad to have seen an integral film of the early 1960s.

This is a fantastic collection without a single “filler” film. These are all great classics and I am pleased to see Turner Classic Movies has released such a splendid collection of Romantic Dramas from the vault.

Written by :

Kindah

 

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