Love In The Afternoon

Love In The Afternoon, a Billy Wilder film released in 1957, illustrates how important casting is. While the film is not up to Wilder's standards--it's a bit badly paced, and only occasionally funny--it really suffers from the leads. They are both great actors: Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn. But Cooper was far too old for the role, and there is a general "ew" factor at having him playing a romantic lead opposite the girlish Hepburn.

Set in Paris, Maurice Chevalier is a private eye who specializes (as most private eyes do) in tailing people and discovering if they're cheating or not. Cooper is a rich American playboy. Hepburn is Chevalier's daughter, a virginal cello player, who overhears one of Chevalier's clients (John McGiver) say that he is going to shoot Cooper for dallying with his wife. Hepburn gets to Cooper ahead of time to warn him, and they are both smitten.

Hepburn, for some odd reason, decides to make up a past for herself involving many men. I suppose it's to make Cooper jealous (he sleeps around, which was an acceptable double standard) but in today's world it just makes her sound like a slut, which I would think would be off-putting to the male version of a slut. This drives Cooper crazy. He doesn't know anything about Hepburn, not even her name. So you guessed it, he hires Chevalier to find out who she is.

This is all well and good but Cooper, who was in his mid-50s and looks older, was twenty-eight years older than Hepburn. Wilder later commented, "I got Cooper the week he turned old." But truth is, the part should have gone to a younger man. It was offered to Cary Grant, but he was too old, too. Perhaps standards for May/December romances were different then, but it doesn't work for a romantic comedy. Someday like Paul Newman or Montgomery Clift would have been better.

It was the first pairing of Wilder with co-screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond, and the two would go on to make two of the best films of that or any era, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. Love In The Afternoon is dull as dishwater in comparison. The only scenes I thought that worked were some comic ones involving a gypsy band that Cooper always has at hand for romantic liaisons (they play "Fascination," which is heard often, perhaps too often). In one scene he shares booze with them by sliding a cart across his hotel room, and then, when he takes a steam, they are in the steam room with him, in full uniforms.

As Billy Wilder films go, Love In The Afternoon is near the bottom. But I haven't seen Buddy, Buddy, his last and supposedly worst film.