Doug C brought up LOVE AFFAIR over in the Top 100 forum, and I mentioned it to SDG in a private message. I've not seen it, but Dave Kehr's very fine article in The Hidden God: Film & Faith (Museum of Modern Art) makes me very interested.

Anyhow, I told SDG that I'd post some excerpt from the book which, by the way, is one of the best I've found on spirituality in film: I strongly encourage you to order yourselves a copy from MoMA, which can be done online or by toll-free phone call. Some of the pieces in the volume don't do a lot for me, but others are superb, including the one I've chopped up for you all here;

LOVE AFFAIR
1939. Directed by Leo McCarey
by Dave Kehr

A devout Catholic from his childhood, Leo McCarey made films with overt religious themes. The best-known is GOING MY WAY... the film attempts to rejuvenate Catholicism for a new generation – to substitute popular music for Latin masses and to bring the church out of its lofty isolation into a sense of social engagement, the inner-city setl\tlement house replacing the cathedral.

Despite its reputation (partially deserved, if truth be told) as sentimental mush, GOING MY WAY espouses a strikingly progressive religious philosophy for its time: Crosby's Father O'Malley is a clear predecessor the the "street priests" of the 1960s, if not of the politically engaged preists of Latin America. But what's most striking about GOING MY WAY and its sequel, THE BELLS OF ST. MARY'S (1945) is how secular they are: apart from one intense and stragely erotic moment of prayer for Ingrid Bergman's radiant Sister Benedict in THE BELLS, they are largely devoid of explicit spiritual content... McCarey's God is an abstract ideal, a moral principle.

McCarey's follow-up to THE BELLS, the fascinating if ultimately unsuccessful GOOD SAM (1948), finds God receding a bit farther. Only the moral principle is left...

To find a more active, mor benign, more inspiring God, it is necessary to return to McCarey's work before GOING MY WAY, and in particular to the extraordinary run of three films he made in the late 1940s: MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW (1937), THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937), and McCarey's masterpiece, the 1939 LOVE AFFAIR. Each is centred on a couple. ... (In TOMORROW), the Coopers establish an ideal for McCarey: theirs is the perfect Christian marriage, a union of souls. The subsequent films in his marriage trilogy move backward from this state of perfection; the protagonists of both THE AWFUL TRUTH and LOVE AFFAIR begin as individuals who are not yet complete, and who are involved in unions that are superficial and unsanctified...

(In THE AWFUL TRUTH) the Warriners' marriage is unearned: they have not demonstrated the moral commitment to each other that would sanctify their relationship. The film moves them through a process of stripping away – their sense of urbanity and sophistication being removed through a series of comic humiliations – and building back. ...

MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW is primaily a melodrama: THE AWFUL TRUTH is primarily a screwball comedy. With LOVE AFFAIR McCarey integrates these apparently antithetical genres, and makes the transition from one to the other mirror his characters' emotional and spiritual development. ...

McCarey's spacial model here is the cathedral, which rises from a ground level dvoted to the secular and the sexual to a high spire, an image of romatic and spiritual transcendence that is, as Terry says of the Empire State Building, "the nearest thing to heaven that we have in the world." The Empire State Building will figure prominently in the plot...

(The lead characters) enter a chapel. Both instinctively fall to their knees and pray in front of the statue of the Virgin... Leaving the chapel, Terry looks around at the world and says, "I've never seen such lovely colors. Everything's so vivid. Even the green is greener." Now we learn Michel was once a gifted landscape painter, but abandoned art in favour of a less strenuous, less committed life...

(After a number of setbacks the couple) now seem prepared for each other, but God has one lat trick up his sleeve: climbing out of a cab, in a hurry to make her appointment with Michel in the Empire State Building, Terry is struck by a car. Michel waits for her in vain, and then, believing she has decided against marrying him, withdraws into a rainy night.

McCarey's God is a cruel God: Terry loses the use of her legs... Not wanting a relationship based on pity, she refuses to tell Michel of her tragedy. And then it is Christmas Even, and Michel, unable to find solace in his old society friends, is walking home by himself in the snow, when he looks up at the now darkened and forbidding Empire State. Suddenly he is interrupted by a strange little man carrying a Christmas tree over his shoulder. The tree's wooden base, a couple of two-by-fours nailed together in the form of a cross, looms into the foreground – and the man accidentally knocks it off, so that it falls in the snow at Michel's feet. Typically for McCarey, this moment of divine intervention – it is a blessing to Michel, and a sign of the direction he should take – is screened by comic dialogue... Continuing his Christmas Calvary, the little man walks off into the darkness.

The final sequence of LOVE AFFAIR...is surely a pinnacle of American screen acting... The surface appearances, vanities, ad false fronts of the characters slip away, leaving a glowing emotional truth. ... Michel experiences a moment of revelation.... He realizes the sale of the sacrifice she has made for him, and he sees his own, ultimate redemption in it. There is talk of further miracles...but they hardly seem necessary now that Terry and Michel have earned their marriage, have achieved the union that, for McCarey, clearly counts among the highest sacraments of his church.

(The director's) subsequent films, although remarkable in many ways, lack the lift and delight, the faith and serenity, of LOVE AFFAIR, certainly one of the twentieth century's greatest works of Christian art.

Dave Kehr has been a film critic for the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune. He currently writes the "At the Movies" column for the New York Times.

New DVDs 1-8-08
For their 50th anniversary edition of Leo McCarey's "An Affair to Remember," Fox Home Video seems to have recoded the already excellent transfer issued in their "Studio Classics" series at a high bitrate (thank you, DVD Beaver, for explaining why it looks significantly, though not dramatically, better) and added a second disc of documentary material. Among the latter is a profile of McCarey featuring some illuminating observations by Peter Bogdanovich, one of the few serious critics (if not the only one) to interview this very great and eternally underappreciated American filmmaker.
Alas, McCarey (shown above in a frame grab from the trailer for "An Affair to Remember") had the bad luck to die in 1969, before the auteurist boom had really hit these shores, and never received the insitutional recognition he deserved in later life. . . .
McCarey also had the bad luck to make several of his most important films for Universal and Paramount, the two studios with the most disgraceful record of keeping their libraries in circulation. It is inexcusable that Universal (which now owns the rights to the pre-1948 Paramount sound films) has not released "Ruggles of Red Gap" (1935) and, above all, "Make Way for Tomorrow" (1937), two of McCarey's towering masterpieces (Yasujiro Ozu acknowledged that "Tokyo Story" was his attempt to remake "Make Way," though I think McCarey's film remains the richer of the two). And Paramount contines to shy away from the brilliant and politically problematic "My Son John" (1952), the most penetrating drama to come out of the Red Scare of the early 50s. . . .
On top of that, two other important McCarey films, the 1936 Harold Lloyd vehicle "The Milky Way" and the 1939 "Love Affair," have both fallen into the public domain, which means that they circulate chiefly in horribly transferred, bargain-bin DVDs. In many ways, "Love Affair," the film that McCarey would remake as "An Affair to Remember," is a more visually expressive film than its descendant -- in one unforgettable shot, McCarey uses a reflection in a window to make the Empire State Building materialize out of nowhere, an apparition more miraculous than anything those kids saw in Fatima. Happily, Turner Classic Movies has a very good print -- a UCLA restoration, I believe -- that the channel keeps in fairly constant rotation. Its next airing is scheduled for February 14, at 7:30 am. . . .
DaveKehr.com, January 8