Love in the Afternoon | Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn

Love in the Afternoon | Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn | SUPERB !!!

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Love in the Afternoon

	Love in the Afternoon Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn Warner Home Video, 2002 average customer review:based on 64 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fairy-tale Paris doesn't get more enchanting than Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon, an ode to picnics on the grass and champagne at the Ritz. Audrey Hepburn (who had already made Sabrina with Wilder) is at her best as the inexperienced cellist with a fascination for millionaire American playboy Gary Cooper. Maurice Chevalier (who else?) is Hepburn's father, a private detective with ample evidence of Cooper's crowded history of l'amour. Alongside the sheen of the romance is Wilder's unerring sense of craftsmanship; watch how inanimate objects such as a liquor tray, a white carnation, or the little dog in the suite next door are developed into sublime running gags. The age difference between the two leads has often been questioned, but perhaps this is what gives the gossamer material the whiff of welcome melancholy. The final three minutes leave no doubt that Wilder hatched the best endings in Hollywood history. --Robert Horton

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Now I Get It

This film is definitely understood better with age. When I first saw it I was 16, and falling in love with Gary Cooper seemed yucky. All these years later, I look beyond that bit of miscasting and I get it: she grew up around adults, preferred their company, and was a hopeless romantic. He was a wealthy womanizer who longed for the purity and innocence she represented; he would have never considered marrying the experienced women he seduced. The story of how they finally get together is truly a delightful romantic comedy!

SUPERB !!!

Both Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn are superb in this story of falling in love and unknowingly being in love. It is beautifully and tenderly acted and lived. It is well-filmed in black-and-white. It could have used some of Hayley Westenra's recordings as background music. Maurice Chevalier does an excellent job of playing Audrey's father and narrator filling in pieces of the story.

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Afternoon Delight that is 'ALL-RIGHT'

Gary Cooper has always been the perfect guy to me. I was skeptical about the somewhat coolish Audrey Hepburn playing opposite the Coop-man.
My fears were unfounded. They are able to project a definite chemistry on film. It is a sweet romance--she, as a cellist has a crush on the much older playboy. Is it strictly a sweet romance? No. There is plenty of humor in this. One of my favorite scenes is the one in which the innebriated Cooper keeps pushing the service cart back and forth, as he is in a blue funk and self-medicating to the max. It is a classic. The great scene however is the ending scene in which they have split up and she runs after the train. He comes to the doorway of the train and sweeps her onboard, sensually cementing their relationship for good. This scene rivals the beach scene in From Here to Eternity (Lancaster, Kerr) in sexiness. A great and scintillating movie. The interiors are elegant.

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A film that gets better as it goes along.

At first I thought I would be disappointed in Billy Wilder's "Love in the Afternoon." The first half plays like tired Parisian boulevard comedy, with little spark or interest, despite Wilder's direction and screenplay and the presence of Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier and especially the always delightful Audrey Hepburn. In the second half, however, the film's wit becomes sharper, and its emotion deeper. That's because Wilder, that sly old fox, allows the film to build as its characters' emotions change, and expects the audience to have the patience to sit still and watch.

I don't understand the general criticism of this film, that Cooper was too old for Hepburn. It was typical throughout Hepburn's early career to pair her with much older leading men (Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, William Holden, Fred Astaire) who brought her delicate, pensive, Cinderella qualities out in bas-relief. Hepburn has better chemistry with Cooper than she did with the notoriously prickly Bogart in an earlier Wilder film, "Sabrina," and--as other reviewers have noted--Wilder has some pointed fun with both Cooper's age and his well-deserved offscreen reputation as a womanizer. Notice that Wilder doesn't shoot Cooper in close-up until the last half-hour of the film, bringing his wrinkles and his general air of exhaustion to the forefront. This has great power, for it shows the previously carefree playboy in all his world-weariness, finally ready to admit that one woman has irrevocably won his heart.

Much of "Love in the Afternoon" isn't as good as it should be, but the last half--and particularly the last five minutes--make the film worthwhile. Just have the patience to go with it.

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