Official PoCo Muse Film Critic Jeff Schultz revisits Love Story for his June 2021 Review.
It’s officially summer which means we are in the blockbuster movie season. Revisiting the Premier Theatre’s golden anniversary in 1971, it would be a few years until such a thing would be established with the release of “Jaws” in 1975. Summers before then would be a slower time for movie theaters since people spent more time outdoors, but this month’s Premier movie is a definition blockbuster with lines that would have stretched down Lafayette Street. Unlike summer hits of today, this one doesn’t have space creatures that attack by sound or Marvel superheroes but presents the simple tale of Ivy League boy meets girl from Radcliffe.
Following last month’s movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” which was the Hollywood’s top moneymaker in 1969, we now look at biggest smash from 1970, “Love Story,” which came to the Premier during its wide release in June 1971. It stars Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal and features a lugubrious theme melody from composer Francis Lai, on location filming at Harvard’s campus, a cameo by Tommy Lee Jones, and more sap than a Christmas tree farm. Paramount Pictures made the film on a shoestring sum of $2 million and raked in $173 million worldwide, dragging the studio out of its financial slump. While the public ate it up, “Love Story” caught sneers from a good number of critics who felt it didn’t deserve its box office windfall, arguing the film was nothing more than a soap opera.
The “soap opera” opens with Oliver Barrett III staring alone at an empty ice skating rank. He is traumatized by the death of Jennifer, his wife, who succumbed to cancer at the young age of 25 (I wouldn’t have told you the ending but these are Oliver’s first lines). His grief beckons us to lend our ears. In flashback, Oliver visits Radcliffe’s library for books he can’t find at Harvard’s library. He asks the chic girl working the desk who scolds him for being a “preppie” but wiles him into taking her for coffee. He enjoys her scathing wit and through playful glowering, a romance develops. Like in any classic love story, theirs seems doomed, this time at the disapproval of Oliver’s rich father who hoped better for his son than choosing a future with a daughter of a small-time baker. Oliver and Jenny marry but Oliver grows more vexed by the strained relationship with his father and Jenny tries to help him reconcile, although it brings problems of its own. Soon the couple decide they want to start a family and after tests, a doctor confides in Oliver that his wife is terminally ill. He feels guilty of not giving Jenny a better life but she embraces him before she dies and lets him know that “love is never having to say you’re sorry.”
To the credit of “Love Story,” popular romance films that came before it were known to be cheesy. They range from cornball like “Love Finds Andy Hardy” for example to overly dramatic like “Wuthering Heights” and “Gone With the Wind” in Hollywood’s golden age. In the 1950s, director Douglas Sirk made a number of movies that were quickly identified as melodramatic and seen as campy today but they looked deeper at social issues and taboos. The 1960s had its own mix of hokey (e.g. the “Gidget” series) and ambitious (“Doctor Zhivago”). What made “Love Story” an easy target for parody is the line “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” It’s enough to make some people cry or gag. O’Neal showed a bit of self-deprecating humor later in the 1972 film “What’s Up, Doc?” when Barbara Streisand quotes him the phrase and he responds, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Arthur Hiller, director of “Love Story,” talked about his interpretation of the line saying its message is not only for Oliver and Jenny but a message to a public divided by social issues at the time. Just because you disagree with someone about something does not mean you can’t love the person, Hiller said.
Erich Segal, who wrote both the novel and screenplay of “Love Story”, spent more time defending his work than basking in its success. “I never meant for it to be considered serious art,” he told a crowd while speaking at UCLA. Segal, who worked on the 1968 animated Beatles film “Yellow Submarine,” said he wrote a script after hearing a former student’s woeful experience of losing their spouse. He claimed every studio turned him down and so he published it as a book instead. After it was read by one out of every five Americans, someone changed their mind about doing the movie. “Love Story” was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards, a rare category for a movie whose book debuted first.
What I enjoy most about “Love Story” is how much it is of its time. I don’t follow fashion too closely (I doubt I can tell the difference between an issue of Vogue Magazine and Good Housekeeping) but I love seeing the roll-neck sweaters, yellow plaid skirts, popped collars, camel hair coats and a print cotton Camp Tuckahoe T-shirt (which fans can buy online). Probably my favorite scene is seeing Jenny and Oliver’s frolic on Harvard’s football stadium knee-deep in snow with Lai’s harpsichord and oohing vocals on the soundtrack. It’s the schmaltziest thing you’ll ever see at the movies.
I think many people went to see “Love Story” because it takes a classic storyline and inserts it with modern characters. Segal writes Oliver and Jenny as equals with realistic problems and goals and is not afraid for them to let loose with some foul language now and then (which the Premier was sure to warn parents about in its ad despite the “GP” rating). I like the movie in the beginning when it’s simply focused on them. It’s in the second half that loses much of my attention when the plot steers towards Oliver’s desperate attempts to solve matters with his father. Though “Love Story” is a quintessential tearjerker, I have to agree with Segal that it shouldn’t be regarded too highly. My rating is 2 ½ out of 4 stars. Normally I’d apologize if you don’t agree with me, but “Love Story” says I don’t have to.