Love in the Afternoon | Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn

Love in the Afternoon | Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn | Incredibly Alluring

DVDs:

Love in the Afternoon

	Love in the Afternoon Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn Warner Home Video, 2002 average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Love in the Afternoon

This is a delightful outing for Hepburn, who'd already been featured opposite an established, aging Hollywood star in another Wilder film ( "Sabrina" , with Humphrey Bogart). "Love" is a sophisticated romantic comedy with lots of Gallic joie de vivre that will brighten any rainy day. Chevalier, one of France's biggest stars, is marvelous as Hepburn's protective Dad. And Cooper, even at an advancing age, is charming in the extreme. Don't miss that famous ending at the train station- it's one of Wilder's cutest closers.

Incredibly Alluring

Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper make an unlikely pair for a lot of reasons in this film but that does not stop the relationship from working. It sizzles.

Audrey is a young Parisian girl, the daughter of a private investigator played by Maurice Chevalier. She is young, beautiful, innocent and plays the cello and is a bit bored. She treats herself to adventure by reading the case files of her father. A good proportion of these case files involve the character played by Gary Cooper. He is a rich American playboy who is always got women. Often, these women are married.

Cooper is the single largest source of income for Chevalier and Chevalier cannot help be admire his style. Having gypsy musicians on call to serenade the mark day and night is just one example.

When Hepburn learns that an outraged husband plans to kill Cooper, she secretly goes to warn the lovers. In doing so, she falls for Cooper herself and manages to arouse his interest. She knows that any sort of clinging will just turn him off so she tries to play his own strategy against him. She plays the mysterious playgirl with more beaux than she can count. She will not even give him her name.

The strategy works. Cooper falls for her in a big way but still she remains silent. In desperation, Cooper hires a private investigator to learn more about her. Naturally, this would be her father.

Things do not work out as expected but they do work out well. Hepburn portrays beauty and innocence and not a little female cunning. She is a delight to behold. So are Cooper's fits of uncertainty. Chevalier lends the whole episode a degree of class and dignity. It's a first fate story all around.

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Sparkling if a Bit Overlong Boulevard Comedy Shows Wilder and Hepburn in Top Form

There is likely no more romantic ending to a Hollywood movie than the one in this soufflé-light 1957 romantic comedy, where Audrey Hepburn tries to keep up with a departing train upon which Gary Cooper stands and listens intently to her babbling about her fictitious sexual conquests. Hepburn plays Ariane, a young cellist and the daughter of a Parisian private investigator named Claude Chevasse. She has an unbridled interest in her father's often tawdry cases, chief among them the affairs of Frank Flannagan, a millionaire industrialist and aging playboy who finds himself in various trysts with married women around the world. A certain Monsieur X has come to Chevasse to catch his wife in a suspected extramarital fling with Flannagan. Overhearing Monsieur X's intention to kill his wife and her lover, Ariane decides to warn Flannagan, and they embark on an afternoons-only affair under the pretense that she is as much a worldly bon vivant as he is. Things come to a head when Flannagan becomes infatuated with this mysterious "thin girl" and recruits Crevasse to find out who she is.

Master filmmaker Billy Wilder leaves his unmistakable stamp on this confection with a clever, ironic script co-written with his long-time partner I.A.L. Diamond in their first collaboration. The dialogue is full of their trademark sparkling banter, and leave it to Wilder to use a Gypsy string quartet to act as a chorus for Flannagan's sexual shenanigans. Hepburn is her usual impeccable self as Ariane and especially good fun when she layers the deceptions about her checkered past. Cooper played this type of boulevardier role in the 1930's under masters like Ernst Lubitsch, and it is quite enjoyable to see him come back to this milieu two decades later as an aging lothario. Looking weather-beaten after years of Westerns and adventure pictures, he was given a lot of grief because of the age difference between him and Hepburn, but I actually find the gap quite touching and Cooper surprisingly game. Maurice Chevalier is ideally cast as Crevasse even if he has to play down his naturally effervescent manner. Granted the film runs a little too long at 126 minutes, but it is fine, light entertainment similar to Wilder and Hepburn's previous collaboration, the classic 1954 "Sabrina". The print transfer on the 2005 DVD is fine though not outstanding. Unfortunately there are no extras included.

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Love before nightfall in Paris!

Ariane Chavasse, daughter of a French detective, loves to read her father's private dossiers... She becomes fascinated with the file concerning American playboy millionaire Frank Flannagan and a certain Madame X... She soon learns that Monsieur X has sworn to kill the American, so she goes to his hotel suite to warn him... Flannagan, intrigued by the attractive mysterious girl, dates her for the following afternoon... Ariane is captured by his sophistication, and a succession of many 'afternoon rendezvous' follows...

Concealing her identity, Ariane tells Frank of the many lovers in her past... He now becomes concerned about her... One day, in a steam bath, Flannagan meets Monsieur X, who advises him to consult detective Chavasse... He does, asking the detective to find out about the mysterious girl...

Reunited with Billy Wilder, Audrey Hepburn once again finds herself cast opposite a father figure in the person of Gary Cooper... Their vehicle is a gay comedy that derived from a Claude Anet novel called 'Ariane,' and it had been filmed twice before... Both adaptations clung to the novel's concept of an innocent young girl's winning over a middle-aged Don Juan by pretending a romantic past of her own to equal his, and eventually reforming him altogether...

With the most popular French entertainer of the last century Maurice Chevalier as the loving father, and John McGiver as the jealous husband, and considering its slight plot, 'Love in the Afternoon' maintains an atmosphere of sly charm and amusing details that almost sustains the film's length...

Director Wilder is helped immensely by the luminous black-and-white photography of William Mellor and by musical composer Franz Waxman, whose various arrangements of the movie's long-playing leitmotif 'Fascination' lend so much to the resulting effect...

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