GROSS/61 1970 - Love Story - grim corporate weepie
It was meant to stop the New Hollywood. It failed.
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LOVE STORY; ALI MACGRAW, RYAN O’NEAL, JOHN MARLEY, RAY MILLAND; directed by ARTHUR HILLER; written by ERIC SEGAL; studio PARAMOUNT; 101 minutes. Wikipedia, IMDB, Letterboxd.
Love Story was a weapon - a last-ditch PSYOP by the studios, intended to undermine and discipline the New Hollywood mavericks, who were about to carelessly change everything. The idea was that its wholesome story and its various tactical accommodations with the radicals (some mild swearing, an atheist wedding) would somehow innoculate younger movie audiences against the new and sustain the old, conservative paradigm for a bit longer by offering a neutered, suburbanised version of the radical one.
It’s a weepie
Love Story is not a melodrama. Weepies are sometimes melodramas but this one isn’t. It’s distilled, diminished. It’s just the tears - none of the cruelty or nobility. No insoluble dilemmas or sacrifices. Some of the elements are here - class, family, money - but it’s simplified. In the three acts we’re rushed through the romance, the marriage and the tragic departure. And you will definitely cry. This is what made Love Story famous and singular: it made everyone cry. Pauline Kael hated it. She doesn’t let on but I know that she cried too, although she was absolutely the fiercest critic of Hollywood sentimentality.
If Love Story makes you feel uncomfortable, it’s this truncated, diminished shape that’s to blame. There’s something peremptory about the whole thing, in fact. As if writer and director couldn’t really be bothered to add anything beyond the one big, terrible thing that happens: a young woman’s awful death. Set this thin, sad material alongside the emotional and social complexity of the melodramas - Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, any of the movies on this BFI list - epic battles with conscience or family or society. In Love Story everybody’s cutting corners. The couple’s doctor dumps the information that Jenny is dying so brutally it’s as if he’s late for a lunch appointment. The hospital scenes are boiled down to a quick corridor conversation about platelets and an awkward cuddle. It’s a big Hollywood puzzle that this film reduced the moviegoing world to snotty sobs and made millions. How did they do that? I think it must have something to do with MKUltra.
Counter to what?
Jenny Cavilleri (Ali MacGraw) is given some lines about ‘bringing the troops home’ but it’s not real. The movie’s counterculture is a cynical parody - a watered-down Ivy League liberalism for the masses. Jenny’s poor father Phil (John Marley), a working class, greatest generation Italian-American, is priggishly asked to make accommodations with the young couple’s modern ideas and it’s heartbreaking. They’re rubbing his nose in their cool, new values. He deals with it gamely, lovingly conceding Jenny’s ‘DIY’ humanist wedding ceremony. She marries pig-headed ultra-WASP Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O’Neal). In a hospital corridor Phil is reduced to tortured ‘new man’ language - it’s a profoundly awkward moment, a kind of ‘get with it daddy-o’. Phil, standing for blue-collar America, is asked to say: “I wish I hadn’t promised Jenny I’d be strong for you, Oliver.” The whole thing grates.
At this moment in Hollywood’s history, the long-hairs and film school-graduates and McGovern Democrats are already ripping through the studio system, turning the production code and the old conformities on their heads (and, not incidentally, setting things up for a run of movies as good as any since the 1940s). The studios are helpless.
Feeble fightback
Love Story tells us all we need to know about the contortions the struggling majors are having to make to adjust to this new context. Phil stands for all of ordinary America, for the hundred million regular cinema-goers: tolerating or accepting (sometimes adopting) the weird ideas their kids are bringing home from college. In this he reminds me of my dad, who’d generously try to take on all the bullshit I brought to the dining table: punk, postmodernism, identity politics… It makes me blush to remember my boorish intellectual superiority.
And circling the central theme is Love Story’s anti-hero: Oliver Barrett III (Ray Milland). I think he might be the best thing about this movie. He brings the history of Hollywood to the production and suggests the depth it might have had if Segal and Hiller had been interested in anything beyond sterotype. Milland’s filmography, which includes many leading roles, is full of complicated, flawed, despairing characters in situations with more than one possible outcome - not least in Wilder’s bleak bleak bleak The Lost Weekend - but here he’s asked only to model a stiff overcoat. In one scene he gets into his E-Type after attending a hockey match, leaving his son, bruised from a brawl on the ice and obstreperous, at the kerb, but we’re not shown his entry to the car. It would have required him to bend a little.
I’ve done what I often do here and demolished a loved movie on flimsy grounds. I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I get started, I do some research and the thing falls apart in my hands. Love Story’s not ugly or abusive or stupid. But it is an awkward, embarrassed compromise; an attempt at an accommodation with social change from Paramount, one of the medium’s biggest and most successful firms in a moment of crisis; a crisis that it wouldn’t survive - at least not in its old form. Love Story is essentially a business school case-study for how to prosper at the end of one social regime and the birth of another. Read it closely, kids.
Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review, written before she’d taken up her staff job, is fierce but, interestingly, she gives more time to Segal’s novelisation, written after the movie’s release. The review is in the New Yorker archive but I don’t think there’s any way for me to share it with you unless you have a subscription.
John Marley was a Cassavetes alum who would later wake up with a horse’s head.
Is it relevant that Ray Milland, once Paramount’s highest-paid star, met and married Muriel Frances Weber on 30 September 1932 and was still married to her when he died in 1986?
Catherine Liu, a University of California film scholar, writes about melodrama, class, literature, trauma and the movies here on Substack.
Love Story the book was the first novelisation to become a big hit in its own right. Its author, who based it on his own screenplay, was Erich Segal, a classical scholar who didn’t seem to be too conflicted about producing pulp of the highest order in his spare time. In fact, when the time came, he wrote a follow-up novel and the screenplay for the sequel Oliver’s Story. It wasn’t a hit and the film’s director John Korty later said “…the movie that came out is almost necrophilia. You know, it's Ryan on a bridge mourning the loss of Jenny…”
Love Story is on Amazon Prime and there’s a Blu-Ray.
All these reviews are on Letterboxd.