50 Love Stories We Love

Mamie (1964)

This Alfred Hitchcock mystery tells an unsettling tale about the kind of love that has to blossom inside a marriage to make it a real union. So here is a love story about phobias, lies, sexual terror and crises. The overconfident, aristocratic man (Sean Connery) who swiftly marries a spectacular-looking thief (Tippi Hedren) struggles to figure out who he has really married and why she's frigid-- and he doesn't get righteously loved until he does.

The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

In Woody Allen's best film, unhappily married housewife Mia Farrow wins the man of her dreams, a film character (Jeff Daniels) who, because she has fantasized it so intensely, steps right off the screen to woo her. A powerful argument for the movies' ability to transform lives, and one of the greatest final scenes in film history.

Mrs. Soffel (1984)

This overlooked gem tells the true story of a turn-of-the-last-century scandal in which the fragile, pious wife of a Pittsburgh prison warden fell so in love with the charismatic convicted mutderer to whom she was trying to bring spiritual comfort that she ended up helping him escape and running away with him. The improbable seems perfectly plausible when the murderer is played by Mel Gibson, who gives a performance that shows us all the subtle changes by which the murderer blooms with true love, allowing Mrs. Soffel (Diane Keaton) to accomplish her original purpose.

II Postino (1994)

The improbable, life-changing relationship between a shy, simple villager (Massimo Troisi) and a worldly libertine poet (Philippe Noiret) sets the stage for the hero to set his sights on winning the woman (Maria Grazia Cucinotta) he loves from afar. Of course, he gets what he wants, but not for long. Poetic in virtually every sense of the word.

Out of Africa (1985)

OK, we've got Africa as a backdrop for the love affair of two white people. We've got Ralph Lauren tableaux with designer animals to match designer clothes. We've got Robert Redford as an Englishman with an American accent. So what? The movie works because it enacts a fundamental drama: an extreme masculine ideal and an extreme feminine spirit meet and duke it out. Redford and Meryl Streep give us fleshed-out characters with interesting minds to mask the basic conflict of the wandering, abstract male and the home-bound, materialistic female. The hopeless intensity of the attraction/repulsion between them proves even more fascinating than Africa.

The King and I (1956)

As platonic lovers in this Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr embody a powerful, forbidden attraction that dares not cross the lines of class (barbarian/lady), culture (East/West) or costumes (silk pajamas/hoop skirts). Steer your kids away from the recent animated remake and straight toward this glittering gem.

The Shop Around the Corner (1940)

Director Ernst Lubitsch's silken, subtle charmer about two coworkers who despise each other yet are (unbeknownst to both) passionate, lonely hearts pen pals. As the two people who at first think they're too good for each other then realize they're too good to pass up, James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan can't be beat--even by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the recent rehash You've Got Mail.

Beauty and the Beast (1946)

Since most movie love stories are thinly disguised "fairy tales," we prefer this actual fairy tale, which, like all great fairy tales, deals in dark psychology, rococo eroticism and poetic sexual metaphor. Jean Cocteau's simple, magical retelling of this old chestnut shines in its exploration of what transpires when a virginal beauty cannot resist the sexual pull of a creature with the exterior of a monster and the soul of an angel.

The Year of Living Dangerously (1983)

A journalist (Mel Gibson) on assignment in the political tinderbox of Indonesia in 1965 puts the story he's after before the girl he's after (Sigourney Weaver), and, like many a guy, doesn't straighten out his priorities any too soon. Even with a mystic benefactor masterminding his awakening to the preeminence of love, he must go nearly blind before seeing that the woman he's fallen for matters more than the byline on a front-page story.

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)

This story of the bird with Givenchy plumage who will perish if caged is a parable about how even the most chic, self-created urban beings have to face the truth occasionally. Impeccable Audrey Hepburn plays a kept party girl who deludes herself that she's free; impossibly good-looking George Peppard plays a kept man who tells himself he's going to become a serious writer. When both characters get honest--in a finale involving an abandoned cat in a rain-soaked alley--be sure to have tissues on hand.

Love Affair (1939)

Despite many remakes and imitations, no one has ever improved on the original version of this heartbreaker about two sophisticates--both engaged to other, less scintillating people--who fall in love aboard a ship and then part reluctantly for six months to see if their passion is true. The results are, of course, disastrous. Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer give funny, sad, poignant performances as the sort of people we only dream of meeting on a Princess cruise.

Trouble in Paradise (1932)

Is there really only one ideal mate for each of us? Ernst Lubitsch's splendid, rueful and sophisticated romantic comedy pairs up two light-fingered con artists--Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall--who endanger their union when they set up a sting on attractive heiress Kay Francis, who's at least as right for Marshall as Hopkins is.

Romeo and Juliet (1968)

It's a great story, sure. But if you're telling the perfect love story--i.e., one that kills the young lovers before they can start squabbling--what counts is who plays Romeo and Juliet. Director Franco Zeffirelli deserves eternal kudos for casting unknowns Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, two heartbreakingly gorgeous teenagers caught at what turned out to be an exact moment of peak beauty. And they could act. Trust no one who doesn't cry at the end.

West Side Story (1961)

A gloriously moving musical Romeo and Juliet on the mean streets of New York during the golden age of the juvenile delinquent, a time when Maria, the Puerto Rican Juliet, could be played by porcelain-white Natalie Wood and the tragic killing of Tony (Richard Beymer), the updated Romeo, could be brought about by what seems to have been the only gun in the whole slum (that's '61-speak for 'hood).

Titanic (1997)

James Cameron pitched it to the studio as "Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic," but that doesn't quite nail it. Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack is not the scion of a rival aristocratic family, but a penniless artist, and it is not a war between clans that brings death to young love, but an iceberg. In fact, it's interesting to note that such a miraculously popular love story has at its core, in our post-women's-lib times, the presence of a passionate and good-hearted young man who becomes, as his lover later describes it, "the person who saved me in every way it's possible for someone to be saved." The pitch could more correctly have been, "Someday my prince will come ... and die for me."

One Way Passage (1932)

Here's a quintessential shipboard fantasy about love that defies all odds. The two strangers who meet and fall for each other both harbor their own Terrible Secret. Glamorous socialite Kay Francis bravely hides her fatal disease, while suave William Powell hides the fact that he's a criminal en route to prison for life. Sure it's romance-novel nonsense, but it's done with such panache you might be sorry they don't make 'em like this anymore.

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