There are two fleeting
moments in Love Story, based on author Eric Siegel’s bestselling novel
that became a publishing phenomenon,where the major social and
political issue of the day – the war in Vietnam – intrudes into a film
notorious for deflecting or displacing larger concerns of the day into
seemingly private questions of love and family. Of course, it was a common
assertion in the Sixties and Seventies that the “personal is the
political,” and Love Story could well be said to be politically
“relevant” (to use another catchphrase of the times) around questions of class
and generation as they play out in two families. But it’s certainly the case
that one would be hard-pressed in the many scenes set outdoors on college
campuses (Harvard and Radcliffe) to see any signs of antiwar protest or
leafletting or whatever: instead, outside provides a site for a couple to
frolic in the snow or toss a football back and forth in an empty stadium that
thereby becomes their own private playground.
All the more surprising,
then, that the first allusion, to militarism, comes in a very privatized inner
sanctum, a members’-only club where Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O’Neal) comes to
spar verbally with his millionaire snob father (Ray Milland) over young Oliver’s
desire to marry a girl from across the tracks, Jenny Cavilleri (Ali MacGraw).
As they begin their conversation, Barrett Senior asks his son about what a
classmate will be doing after graduation and learns the kid is joining Army
Officer’s Training. Good, says the imperious father, to which his son replies
“Bad.” One shouldn’t perhaps make too much of this but it is a moment that
raises the question of the good or bad of fighting for one’s country,
especially when it can be so deadly. Later, in another indoors scene, young
Barrett, now a budding lawyer, tells a pal at their gym, that he's turned down
a request by his law firm to go defend a journalist beaten up by cops “in
Chicago” (he doesn’t tell his friend that he needs to stay home with Jenny,
who’s got a fatal illness). Again, the moment passes quickly but it was likely
impossible for most viewers in 1970 not to understand the reference as code for
police brutality against protestors and their journalistic advocates.
The critics generally hated Love
Story for what they imagined as its refusal to address the times. Fans
loved it, often, for that very refusal: it allowed them to cry about something
other than the real death and dying (both overseas and in the streets of the
cities back home). But even though the American Film Institute lists it as number
9 amongst all romances, we should note that this film is ultimately, like what
one could read in the papers or see in many other movies, about life abruptly
cut short.. Maybe it’s not brutal death, à la other films of the moment like,
say, The Wild Bunch or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but just
as these films are saying something about the violence of the times even as
they look to other times for their specific subject matter, Love Story is
marked by a fatalism that actually could be saying something resonant about
fragility of live in that historical moment. Love Story perhaps is due
for critical reconsideration, and Paramount’s careful remastering of the film
in striking Blu-ray might well help in that project.
The careful digitalization
allows the viewer to focus on visual accomplishment as much as the saccharine
story. For example, there are some impressive long-takes often with a complex
choreography between character and camera. Most noteworthy is the Blu-ray’s
careful capture of the color design for the film: a washed out look for scenes
of Cambridge and New York in winter matched to oppressive dark but
oh-so-masculine colors (browns and blacks) in the interior scenes of Oliver’s
confrontations with his father, both leavened by touches of red, from a single
lamp in the brown wood of Barrett Senior’s imperial home office to the scarlet
dresses or miniskirts that Jenny sports and that bring vitality into a story of
staid convention and oppressive rule-boundedness across class and generational
lines.
The Blu-ray combines several
new special features with ones that were available earlier in DVD editions. New
are a short discussion of the film by critic Leonard Maltin and a very brief
introduction by Ben Mankiewicz to an airing of the film on TCM. Both tend to
repeat commonplaces about the film -- sometimes the same ones, such as that the
film resonated with audiences who needed sweet emotion in a complicated
historical moment – and both go over well-known production facts, such as that
Ali MacGraw was in large part cast because she was Paramount boss Robert
Evans’s girlfriend at the time.
Carried over from the DVD are
a 14-minute documentary “Love Story: A Classic Remembered,” which goes
over much of the same ground as Maltin and Mankiewicz, and a commentary track
by director Arthur Hiller. Hiller’s narration is curious, caught between light
anecdotes (for example, Ray Milland agreeing to not wear his beloved toupee for
this film) and some sparse but useful technical discussion (for example, how
some of those impressive meandering long takes were engineered) and, fairly
unbearably, fatuous thematic commentary about how Hiller wants to make films
that say something (in this case, something about the triumph of human spirit).
Nonetheless, whatever one
thinks of it, Love Story at the very beginning of the 1970s is a key
film in American cinema history, and it is so important to have this carefully
crafted Blu-ray to commemorate it.