Here's to Love on Our Own Terms

Rating: 10/10 (8 January 2006)

I feel a need to tell you a short anecdote about seeing this movie. When it was restored in the late 1990s, the New York premiere took place at the Ziegfeld. I managed to wangle my way in and saw so much in this movie I hadn't seen before, that can't really be seen except on the big screen.... and when I left the theater, I saw couples coming out..... and three or four women slapped the men they were with.
Now it seemed to me clear that they felt that they had undergone some of the transformations imposed on the Kim Novak character by the Jimmy Stewart character for the sake of their relationships and bitterly resented it.... but it seemed to me that Stewart was also transformed by the relationship. In fact, he was destroyed by the relationship.... and was his acquiescence at all voluntary? Yet people do not see the sacrifices that others make for love, they only see their own, and they regret them bitterly.... and that, it seems to me, is that what this movie is about: the forces and twists and turns, the ignoring the clear signs, the self destruction at so many levels that love drives us to. This cynical, manipulative movie about absolute love.
Three or four big, hairy men slapped by women. And taking it. Who had been dragged unwillingly into a different personality for the sake of love?