By David Raether
You’d like something different, something with big romantic emotions that sweep you up from the day's cares. I, therefore, give you a list of great romantic movies with the most romantic couples in screen history. You’re welcome.
Here’s a quick way to get some street cred with your rom-com fanatic friends: recommend they watch this movie. I’m pretty sure they’ve never heard of it. And yet it’s one of the best romantic comedies of all time. It was remade and updated in 1998 as You’ve Got Mail. Although, to be honest, the update already seems rather outdated. Whenever I see someone with an aol.com email address, my first thought is: “I wonder if they churn their own butter, too?”
Directed by the legendary German/Jewish-American filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch, this movie is, for some reason, set in a leather goods shop in Budapest, and even though everyone is supposedly Hungarian, no one speaks Hungarian. Most of them speak English with an American accent. Look, let’s just ignore that for now.
Our romantic couple, in this case, is a sales clerk, Alfred Kralik (James Stewart), and the smart, beautiful, charming, and quick-witted customer/job applicant Klara Novak (Sullavan). They have a highly contentious relationship, especially after she is hired as a sales clerk. Alfred has been carrying on a pen pal relationship with a mystery woman, and when they finally meet… it’s Klara! Meanwhile, the shop owner, Hugo Matuschek, mistakenly thinks his wife is having an affair with Alfred. Alfred and Klara end up together, and everything works out just fine.
This is such a sweet and good-natured film, with plenty of laughs to leaven out the drama. Hugo, by the way, is played by Frank Morgan, who, a year earlier, was the Wizard of Oz.
Okay, let’s get one thing clear upfront: you will be crying at several points in this movie. Adapted from Nicholas Sparks’ best-selling 1996 tearjerker novel of the same name, this incredibly romantic tale of star-crossed love in the years before, during, and after World War II is designed to get those tear ducts working. This is one of those movies that comes perilously close to being schmaltzy. Perilously close. And yet it never crosses that line. The fact that it doesn’t cross the line is a tribute to everyone involved.
McAdams and Gosling are just great as the young couple. James Garner and Gena Rowlands are equally good as the older couple. I am an enormous fan of Rowlands, especially for her performance in John Cassavetes’s outstanding film about mental illness, A Woman Under the Influence (1974). She and Cassavetes were married. They had two children. One of them, Nick, was the director of this film! The cast also includes Joan Allen, James Marsden, and Sam Shepard. The excellent screenplay was written by Jeremy Leven.
I adore this movie because a version of it happened to me. The film tells the story of two people who meet on a train in Europe. Their travel plans have them going their separate ways at sunrise, so they decide to spend the day together. And they fall in love. This film really resonated with me because, in 1981, I decided to go to Europe. I didn’t have any specific itinerary, but I did want to go to Vienna, although I can’t quite remember why now. Anyway, through a fortuitous sequence of events, I ended up meeting a Serbian woman who was a poet, and we traveled around together, going from Belgrade to Trieste to Venice, to Florence and Siena, and then up to Munich. It was incredibly romantic, and at the end of the trip, we decided—fairly rashly—to get married. We got married about nine months later. Now, this was no flash-in-the-pan romance. We were married for 26 years and had eight children together… before we divorced. So, for me, the story of a couple randomly meeting and sharing a brief courtship together and falling in love makes perfect sense.
What’s outstanding about this movie is that even if this didn’t happen to you, it still feels real. And very romantic. These things can happen. I’m not much of an Ethan Hawke fan, but he is just perfect here, as is Julie Delpy. The film was directed and co-written by one of my favorites, Richard Linklater. Linklater has directed a number of critically-acclaimed films, including the memorable coming-of-age film, Dazed and Confused (1993). This movie just pulsates with the feeling of the excitement of being young, on your own, and falling in love.
Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty in Reds (1981)
This is the pretty-much-true story of American journalist, author, and political activist John Reed (Beatty) and his longtime romantic partner Louise Bryant (Keaton). The story of their love affair is told against the background of the tumultuous years of the Russian Revolution. What’s interesting about this epic movie is that, despite its subject matter, it is at its core a love story.
Reed was a well-known journalist/Marxist, and he wrote one of the best books about the Russian Revolution: Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). The book is notable for its vivid portrayals of Lenin, Trotsky, and other key figures in the revolution. He lived a life filled with adventure, peril, and passionate politics. All of that is in this film, but what really makes the movie work is the love affair between Reed and Bryant. Keaton gives one of the best performances of her life as an independent woman who hitches a ride along with Reed on his immense and complicated life while simultaneously trying to maintain her own identity and career. Reed ultimately died in Russia, the only American buried in the Kremlin.
Were it not for the love story, this would just have been another historical epic, but the relationship —and chemistry—between Keaton and Beatty takes the film to another level. The cast also includes Jack Nicholson (as the playwright Eugene O’Neill), Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton, and George Plimpton. The film was nominated for twelve Academy Awards. Beatty won Best Actor, Stapleton won Best Supporting Actress, and Vittorio Stararo won Best Cinematography. This is a perfect movie to settle into on a chilly winter night with your partner.
What a heart-rendingly beautiful love story this is. Set in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, a pair of couples rent adjacent apartments, and their spouses are often absent. Lonely, Su Li-Zhen and Chow Mo-Wan begin to become friends. And they then learn, ironically enough, that their spouses are having an affair with each other! Su and Chow never acknowledge their obvious feelings of love for each other, vow not to be like their spouses, and circumstances cause them to drift apart.
This film often appears on the list of the greatest films of all time. In 2017, a survey of film critics from around the world rated this movie as the second-best movie of the 21st century so far. Granted, we have another 70+ years to go here in this century, but I'm pretty sure it will hold its position in the century’s top ten when the clock turns over to the 22nd century. The performances by Su Li-Zhen and Chow Mo-wan are perfect. Absolutely perfect. It was written and directed by the celebrated Hong Kong director Kar Wai Wong. The title of the film in Cantonese is Duidao, a translation of the French term for “head to tail.” Of particular note is the costume design—the dresses! Gasp!—by William Chang Suk-ping.
This is one of those movies you put into the DVD player on a chilly December night when the kids are in bed, and it’s just the two of you. You will be transported. It really is one of the most romantic movies I’ve ever seen. And that scene at Angkor Wat… wow.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.