Lisa over at Boondock Ramblings nudged me a bit to join in with the “Spring of Cary” since the Christmas movie reviews (‘Tis the Season Cinema) last year ended up being so fun. I don’t know that I can do all of these, but we’ll see. I don’t know that before this morning I’d ever seen a Cary Grant movie in my life, so it’s interesting for me to see what I’ve “missed”.

I checked the online availability of An Affair to Remember, and apart from trying to find pieces on YouTube or the like, I couldn’t find it for free. I then remembered that I’ve got a local library, and that they might have it, and fortuitously enough, they had this movie, and next week’s film, Holiday.

(I hadn’t been to my local library in years. To put it bluntly, it’s awful. It’s the “regional” library for over 100,000 people, and I doubt it has more books than my grandma’s local library, which was for a town with a population well under 10,000. I remember reading several years ago that it has the fewest books per resident of any library “system” in the area. Their motto seems to be “well, if you really want something, you can use your library card in Kenosha too, so we’ll just let you drive down there to get it.” Not only that, but you’ve got to pay for parking anywhere near there!)

In any case, the movie. It’s cliche, isn’t it, to say that they don’t make movies like this anymore. It did drag a little in some places, but it’s not too bad. All the characters have personalities with good and not-so-good things about them. For instance, it’s understandable how Terry might be in a place to love Ken, but then again, it’s understandable how she fell out of that place. Ken’s not an angel, but he’s far from a devil as well, and it’s things like this that keep the twists and turns of the movie believable.

What’s incredibly interesting to me, at least, and which runs with a lot of what I write about here is the depiction of religion in the film. You see, Terry is a Catholic, Nickie’s grandmother is a Catholic, and the assumption is that even if he’s not necessarily practicing, Nickie is as well. There’s no mention of this until Nickie and Terry disembark from the ship, and they have the opportunity to visit Nickie’s grandmother. Nickie’s grandmother is well-to-do, and she lives on a property that has its own private chapel. When Terry hears about this, she asks the grandmother if she may go in to pray. Here we have that:

There she is, praying before Mary, her head covered and everything. (As another aside, the grandmother was wearing all black which was traditional in some places.) The scene is respectful, and when Nickie comes in to join her, the dynamics of her sincerely praying and him seeming kind of lost is something that one doesn’t see on film now. This movie was also made before Vatican II, so these would definitely be a time of the old style, Latin masses in Roman Catholic Churches.

I’m not Catholic, nor have I ever been. However, the scene struck me because it is different from Orthodox practice (we typically don’t have religious statues) but as a former Protestant, I can see how it can be interpreted as she is “worshipping” Mary. In the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, Mary is honored and extolled and venerated, but not worshipped. As with other saints, we ask for her prayers – our intercessions – to God on our behalf. Being as she was mother to Jesus, we understand that her prayers are particularly “heard” by God. If I would have seen this movie before I was Orthodox, though, I wouldn’t have understood that; I’d be pretty perplexed, as I really didn’t know any Catholics with whom I could talk about religion until I was in college. As someone who understands this somewhat better now, it strikes me as quite beautiful, and the assistance Terry finds later in the movie through the Catholic Church makes more sense in this light.

In any case, the story revolves around Nickie and Terry, two “kind-of” single people who find themselves on a voyage back to the US from Europe without their “almost” partners. They find themselves falling for each other, but have to decide if it’s worth giving up certain “perks” of their current lives to follow love with each other. There’s a subtext, here, too, that neither of them are particularly young. Cary Grant (Nickie) was over 50 when this movie was made though looked 40, and Deborah Kerr (Terry) was 36. This isn’t a story of young kids falling in love, but of two individuals who are older and somewhat disillusioned with their prospects, despite how wonderful those prospects appear from the outside.

Oh, boy, and what glamor with all the 1950s styling! The dresses and suits! The cars and furniture and “luxury touches”! Even though I was watching this movie on the 7″ screen of a portable DVD player that is 10 years old, it still was impressive! (That being said, there are a couple of scenes that the fake backgrounds still looked fake on said 7″ screen!)

Were this a Russian movie, the movie would have been about 30 minutes shorter, and would have ended with the car accident and then Nickie would have ended up dead six months later from alcoholism. But it’s an American movie in the era of hope, and so the film doesn’t end that way. It’s been kind of an awful day, stress-wise, and I ended up crying at the end because there is hope there, that even with the broken people that we are, we can get past the Russian endings to something better.

Anyway, I recommend the movie, and I’m glad that Lisa suggested participating. I haven’t read it yet, but her review can be read here: https://lisahoweler.com/2023/04/27/spring-of-cary-an-affair-to-remember/ and Erin’s review at Cracker Crumb Life can be found here: https://crackercrumblife.com/2023/04/27/the-spring-of-cary-grant-an-affair-to-remember/.

Now, I’m off to reading what they wrote!

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