Love Story (1970) is a sentimental, romantic tearjerker
film from director Arthur Hiller about a tragic couple.
The
melodramatic soap-opera, tremendously popular and a
financial success (the top-earning film of the year)
but
panned by critics for its sappy content, was based upon
Erich Segal's best-selling short novel of the same
name.
The film's tagline, "Love means never having to say
you're
sorry," appeared slightly differently in Segal's
novelization: "Love means not ever having to say you're
sorry."
The catchy, haunting, piano-plinking score
won
the Best Original Score Oscar (the film's sole award)
for
Francis Lai from its seven Academy Awards nominations:
Best
Picture, Best Actor (Ryan O'Neal), Best Supporting
Actor
(John Marley), Best Actress (Ali MacGraw), Best
Director
(Arthur Hiller), and Best Original Story and Screenplay
(Erich Segal). Beau Bridges, Michael York, Michael
Douglas,
Jon Voight, Michael Sarrazin and Peter Fonda all turned
down the part of Oliver - which ultimately went to Ryan
O'Neal.
Told as a flashback, this is an
uncomplicated love story between two star-crossed
lovers-
students, Harvard pre-law hockey player Oliver Barrett
IV
(Ryan O'Neal) and Radcliffe music student Jenny
Cavilleri
(Ali MacGraw). Oliver narrates the opening line of the
film, looking back:
What can you say about a
twenty-
five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and
brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, the Beatles,
and
me?
Their love triumphs over different economic-
class
backgrounds (he is a "preppie millionaire," she a smart-
mouthed "social zero" from a blue-collar
Italian/American
family). Their main obstacle to romance is that his
rich,
powerful and snobbish father, Oliver Barrett III (Ray
Milland) objects and threatens to cut off
funding: "Oliver,
if you marry her now, I'll not give you the time of
day.
"
To which the younger, bull-headed Oliver defiantly
asks: "What offends you more, Father, that she's
Catholic,
or poor?" He ultimately responds: "Father, you don't
know
the time of day." The two young lovers marry anyway and
first move into a small apartment in Cambridge before
Oliver is hired by a New York law firm and they move to
the
city.
The film's two most touching and remembered
scenes are their prolonged kissing scene and the
montage of
the couple tossing snowballs at each other. After
meeting
many obstacles and making sacrifices, she is diagnosed
as
terminally ill when she is tested for pregnancy, and
dies
in his arms at the hospital in a tear-inducing closing.
She
makes a last request of him: "You, after all - you're
going
to be a merry widower." "I won't be merry," he
responds.
She replies: "Yes, you will be. I want you to be merry.
You'll be merry, okay?"
In the final scene, Oliver
quotes his late wife, when speaking to his father about
their past misunderstandings. After his father tells
him
he's sorry that she has died, Oliver responds in the
last
memorable line of the film, quoting an earlier remark
of
Jenny's:
Love means never having to say
you're sorry.
He then walks out into a
snowy
Central Park to contemplate what life might have been
in a
touching finale, as the award-winning musical score
builds
in the background.