Love Story

The fourth of the five films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar fifty years ago is y,Love Story which I had gone all this time without seeing. I watched it today and perhaps it's just the passage of time, but I don't see what all the fuss was about.

Love Story was the highest grossing film of 1970, and made huge stars of Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw (strangely, their stardom didn't outlast the decade) and was based on the most popular book of the year, written by a classics professor, Erich Segal.

It tells the simple tale of two college students at Harvard and Radcliffe (Harvard didn't accept women in those days) who meet, fall in love, get married, and then she dies. We know this from the opening line, when O'Neal, in voiceover says "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?"

He's the son of a millionaire and plays hockey, she's a working-class girl who is studying music. They are antagonistic at first, as she calls him "Preppy" and he calls her a "Radcliffe bitch," which seems a little harsh. But they are attracted to each other, and when she tells him she's going to Paris to study piano, he objects and proposes to her. She takes a teaching job while he goes to law school, so fifty years ago it was still acceptable for women to give up their careers for their husband.

O'Neal's father, Ray Milland, objects to him marrying so quickly and cuts him off. Her father, played by John Marley, is completely accepting, even when they don't have a church wedding. I found the most interesting part of Love Story to be about fathers and adult children--the relationships between these two fathers and the leads is more honest and authentic than the love story. A moment late in the film, when McGraw is dying, between O'Neal and Marley outside her hospital room is the only time I felt any emotion.

Arthur Hiller directs, and he manages to make it visually interesting. The problem is the script, also by Segal, that has ridiculous dialogue, the kind that only exists in novels. Both O'Neal and McGraw seem like idealized characters, fantasies for both men and women. They're not very well developed characters, and are in love only because the script says so.

The death of McGraw is also something only in movies. She still looks gorgeous, with long black hair, even on her death bed. It's never stated what she has, though it sounds like leukemia, but she obviously didn't have chemotherapy. I liked critic Judith Crist's comment that it was "Camille with bullshit."

I have one film to go, Patton, which I'll get to later this year. But it's fascinating that two cutting edge films, M*A*S*H and Five Easy Pieces, sat alongside two relics like Airport and Love Story.