Love Affair: The Nearest Thing to Heaven

Everything changes between Michel and Terry during a stopover in Madeira, where Michel’s grandmother lives. The family matriarch, played by Maria Ouspenskaya, ushers the former altar boy and his companion into the chapel next door to say a prayer. McCarey uses the scene to showcase Terry’s piety as she kneels in front of a statue of the Madonna. Michel sees her in a different way because of their shared faith. Cinematographer Rudolph Maté emphasizes a new dimension of their relationship with chiaroscuro light that falls across Terry’s face and makes her appear blessed from above. Afterward, when the voyage has resumed, pink champagne and the screwball tone are thrown overboard. Standing in a dreamy mist on deck, Terry and Michel pledge their love, and, before the ship docks, they vow to meet in six months at the top of the Empire State Building.

Dunne was McCarey’s ideal star, a trained opera singer who became a triple threat in Hollywood: she had headlined hit musicals like Roberta (1935), played long-suffering heroines in three-hanky melodramas such as Back Street (1932) and Magnificent Obsession (1935), and received an Oscar nomination for her first attempt at screwball comedy, Theodora Goes Wild (1936). McCarey and Dunne shared the kind of rapport that was as rare in Hollywood as their individual commitment to monogamy in lifelong marriages. United by Irish Catholic backgrounds and a love of music, they enjoyed a harmonious relationship on set. Dunne embraced McCarey’s off-the-cuff script method as an extension of the melodies they improvised on the piano. She reveled in the energetic pace the director orchestrated throughout production. And she earned Oscar nominations for their work together in both The Awful Truth and Love Affair.

Boyer made the third corner of an inspired triangle, himself a Catholic and a connoisseur of improvisation. The established leading man was keen to work with McCarey, as Larry Swindell reports in Charles Boyer: The Reluctant Lover. Boyer and his wife, Pat Paterson, owned prints of two McCarey pictures in their personal collection: Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) and The Awful Truth. In addition to screening the director’s screwballs for friends, Boyer studied the films closely for the way they engineered a character with comic bits of business.

But McCarey didn’t believe Terry deserved punishment, and he ultimately didn’t consider the imposed incident some kind of divine retribution. He underscores the faultlessness of Terry’s position and the sacrifice she made by not contacting Michel. And Dunne’s performance eschews self-pity, so the audience feels for her. McCarey reunites the lovers in a theater on Christmas Eve. Michel greets Terry with exaggerated politesse, and Terry allows him to think the worst rather than confide the truth. The next day, Christmas, he comes to Terry’s apartment and tries to hide his heartbreak. He brings a gift—his grandmother’s lace shawl. Terry cradles the shawl in her arms as if it held an infant child. He wants answers, but he also just wants to see the woman he loves. They play a game, pretending it was Michel who failed to show that day in July.

McCarey builds our anticipation for the moment when Michel learns why Terry never made their date. The scene plays without dialogue. Michel walks into Terry’s bedroom and finds the portrait he painted of her praying, which he gave away earlier to a poor woman in a wheelchair, not knowing she was Terry. For nearly thirty seconds, Boyer stares at it in silence, with his eyes wide open. The moment is an epiphany, a sudden realization of truth. Waves of emotion rise and fall across his face in exquisite underplay. Choked with remorse, Michel performs an act of contrition. Now that he sees how Terry has suffered alone, Michel resolves that she will struggle no longer.