Love In The Afternoon — directed by Billy Wilder. Romanic Comedy. A notorious Lothario and a pretty young music student exchange blisses. 130 minutes Black and White 1957.
★★★
This is one of the creamiest Hollywood romantic comedies and it is also the most revolting. What makes it creamy is its confection by Ernst Lubitsch, here impostured by his devotee Billy Wilder, who makes anew Lubitsch’s light, deft, and magical touch with Viennese Pastry. In his heyday, everything Lubitsch did, whether comedy or musical, was operetta, and he used Maurice Chevalier as one of the consistent ingredients, here now present as Audrey Hepburn’s father, although he does appear old enough to be her grandfather. Never mind: he makes no attempt to crush you into marzipan with his charm, and he is just fine. All he has to do is love her, and, since she is Audrey Hepburn, this is not hard to do. Her gentle sense of fun leavens the dessert. What is hard to take is her antediluvian leading man. Why this actress was set opposite ancient leading men for so much of her young life is a mystery. Henry Fonda, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Burt Lancaster, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, the presence of only the last of whom can be said to be justified. I suppose it was to sustain her range as an ingénue. For she was a true ingénue, and we did not have another one until Gwyneth Paltrow, so it’s a rarer flower than one might suppose. Although at the time she made this film she was 29, her quality was always 19, and it is so here. However that may be, whom we have opposite her is an actor in an advanced state of decomposition, Gary Cooper. He has lost his slim hips, so while he wears beautiful clothes he does not look good in them. His face did not age well; his visage sags with sadness; he has luggage under his eyes. He is too darned old. And he is such a bad actor. He cannot pick up his cues properly. He cannot do the simplest actor’s task with simple conviction. And we are still asked, aged 57, to swallow his fraudulent naiveté, and the phony supposition that taciturn men are more profound, more honest, and more masculine. (Have you ever known a cowboy who wasn’t a blabbermouth?) He is completely unconvincing as a wealthy internationally renowned roué, a la Porfirio Rubirosa, just as he was in Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. In real life, Cooper was a roué, but that does not mean he will admit to the shame of so being as a character. What one senses underlying his presence is his overweening vanity, his contempt, and his stumbling deliberately to blind us to his lack of natural or even professional ability. He never would accept a movie in which he died; he had always to be the hero. The logical ending to this movie, which the entrancing Audrey Hepburn carries upon her thin Givenchy-laden shoulders, is that he jump off the train to marry her, but no, he sweeps her on the train to become his mistress. Disgusting. Otherwise, the film is charmingly conceived and written, beautifully filmed by William Mellor, who worked with George Stevens so often. The Lubitsch touches have to do with four musicians going through a door and a rolling liquor table, and a hat, and they are endearing. Lubitsch liked people a lot more than Billy Wilder did, and that cannot be taught. But the film is likable, although revolting, and a model for making a smooth confection to perfection.