AWARDS & HONORS

Hugo Friedhofer came in fifth in the Laurel Awards for Top Music Composer as published in Motion Picture Exhibitor magazine.

Leo McCarey was nominated for the Directors Guild Award.

An Affair to Remember was nominated for four Oscars® -- Best Song, Best Cinematography, Best Score and Best Costume Design.

In the organization's 2005 poll "AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions," members of the American Film Institute named An Affair to Remember the fifth greatest love story in American film history. It came in behind Casablanca (1942), Gone with the Wind (1939), West Side Story (1961) and Roman Holiday (1953).

The Critics' Corner: AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER

"Adding comedy lines, music, color and CinemaScope, Jerry Wald and Leo McCarey turn this remake of the 1939 Love Affair into a winning film that is alternately funny and tenderly sentimental."
- Variety

"I can't take all this seriously. I don't think you're meant to. The marvel is that these two amazing stars make this weepie fun instead of an ordeal. Happily the chuckles drown the tears....And Kerr? Warmly sensitive, I knew. But that wry comic touch -- it's a revelation."
- Sarah Stoddart, Picturegoer

"As before [in 1939's Love Affair], the attraction of this fable is in the velvety way in which two apparently blasé people treat the experience of actually finding themselves in love. This is an immature emotion that is loaded with surprise. And the old script of Love Affair, worked over by Mr. McCarey and Delmer Daves, provides plenty of humorous conversation that is handled crisply in the early reels by Mr. Grant and Miss Kerr....But something goes wrong with the picture, after the couple get off the ship and abandon that area of romantic illusion for the down-to earth realities of dry land. The marriage pact seems ridiculously childish for a couple of adult people to make. The lady's failure to notify her fiancé of her accident seems absurd. The fact that the man does not hear of it in some way is beyond belief. And the slowness with which he grasps the obvious when he calls upon the lady is just too thick."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

"A lush slice of Hollywood romanticism."
- MFB [Monthly Film Bulletin]

"Remake of Love Affair, a surprisingly successful mixture of smart lines, sentiment and tears, all applied with style and assurance."
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide

"Middling remake of McCarey's Love Affair. Bubbling shipboard comedy in first half, overshadowed by draggy soap-opera clichés and unnecessary musical numbers in N.Y.C. finale."
- Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide

"Entertaining enough while the action's still afloat, the plot later gets bogged down in soapy clichés when the characters debark in New York, agreeing to separate and test their love before they marry. Boyer's romantic gravity is much missed in the second half."
- Geoff Andrew, TimeOut Film Guide

"Less rehash than incantation, An Affair to Remember is most affectingly viewed as a dream film. Grant himself allegedly balked at McCarey's decision to film the characters' idyllic Mediterranean interlude in the Fox backlot, yet the unreality of the scenes at the grandmother's home and private chapel, with matte backgrounds and studio lighting, adds to the wistful mood of feelings in tentative bloom. The splendid use of the widescreen, often making Nickie and Terry the warm heart of a cool composition, illustrates the fragility of the couple's idealized romance back in the "real world" while giving lie to the director's supposed indifference to visual expression. McCarey is frequently compared to Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, and indeed, An Affair to Remember looks back at Love Affair the way Ozu's Floating Weeds [1959] looks back at A Story of Floating Weeds [1934]: as a story that once moved the director, retold in changed times as an act of defiantly anachronistic humanism."
- Fernando F. Croce, Slant Magazine

"Nobody would mistake An Affair to Remember for a master class in cinema. McCarey's widescreen technique is utilitarian, and the third act, in which the lovers are kept apart mostly by Kerr's overactive conscience, spends a lot of time spinning its wheels. Yet the principals are in such fine form, underplaying against their stagy backdrops, and the tragic turn of the plot is so gripping, that the movie succeeds in spite of its white-elephant pedigree. In particular, the famous final scene remains an edge-of-the seat experience, as Grant paces around the immobile Kerr, talking in riddles about who did and didn't show up at the Empire State Building that fateful day."
- Donna Bowman, The Onion A.V. Club

"Leo McCarey's remake of his own Love Affair is a masterful update of a pre-war classic for the post war generation. Yet, regardless of whether you see the original or its remake, An Affair to Remember, the net result is ultimately slated to turn out the same -- bring Kleenex!...Truthfully, the plot of this weepy now seems heavily dated. Though there are some inspired romantic touches, McCarey's melodrama does tend to delve into the critical yawn-and-stretch category of sleepers during its middle section."
- Nick Zegarac, MediaScreen

Compiled by Frank Miller