Still in Love With Romantic Movies : Film Makers Are Re-Igniting Those Old Flames of Desire

Want a quick X-ray of your deepest nature? Inventory what video cassettes you’d take for a snow-bound week in the country. My own list made me wince at the same time its transparency made me smile: “Notorious” and “Choose Me,” “Letter From an Unknown Woman” and “Jules and Jim,” the shameless selections of a card-carrying romantic.

“Children of Paradise” and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” should have been in there too. (Although maybe not the first; the thought of that final, tumultuous crowd sequence on a VCR is not a pretty thought.)

It did get me thinking, though, about where our notions of what is or is not romantic are formed. Do they have to hit us, like Thomas Wolfe, before we’re out of our teens? I very much doubt it. We probably need the romantic inclination--but after that, all we need is the proper fuel and then it’s never-ending: “Beauty and the Beast” gets us at one stage, “Brief Encounter” at the next, “Out of the Past” at another and “Days of Heaven” at another.

What are the qualities that make a movie romantic? First you need characters of some substance. Not exceptional people, certainly not the high-born ones the Greeks required for classic tragedy; simply men or women with a distinct code, a clear set of values.

Ordinary as they seemed, Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson’s characters in “Brief Encounter” were as rooted in their sense of what was possible and what wasn’t as any Greek oracle. It was her deeply ingrained sense of duty that kept Audrey Hepburn’s sweet, funny princess and Gregory Peck’s resourceful reporter apart in “Roman Holiday,” not the differences in their stations.

Next, you have to have powerful forces pulling your lovers apart: Romeo and Juliet’s warring families; the bedrock differences in politics and values that tore apart Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in “The Way We Were”; the encroaching Second World War in “Casablanca,” combined with the fact that, in truth, the Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman characters weren’t really right for each other. The basic man/woman difference in “Out of Africa”: a sense of freedom at war with a sense of possessiveness that threatened Meryl Streep’s Baroness Blixen and Robert Redford’s Denys Finch Hatton.

Our lover(s) must brave illogic, the social fabric of their day, fate and even life itself to be together. The entire Russian Revolution seemed to conspire against Lara and her Zhivago. And death seemed to stand between Dana Andrews’ detective and Gene Tierney’s enigmatic character in “Laura.”

So, does romance have to involve sacrifice and separation? Must we have Warren Beatty breathing his last in the snow of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” while Julie Christie stares transfixed into the glaze of an opium bottle and the camera stares transfixed into the recesses of her sublimely beautiful eye? Or Jeanne Moreau’s Catherine in “Jules and Jim,” forthrightly driving Jim off a bridge to both their deaths, leaving (poor? lucky?) Jules behind . . . yet again? Or Laurence Olivier holding the dying Merle Oberon for one last look at Pennistone Crag in “Wuthering Heights”?

Not necessarily. Writer-producer Charles Brackett once described the secret of his films, frequently made with Billy Wilder, as “making the audience want something very much . . . and then giving it to them.” There doesn’t seem to be any lasting sin in letting lovers live. “Notorious” is not one whit less stirring because Cary Grant gets Ingrid Bergman safely out from under the noses of those suspicious South American Nazis. The lovers of “A Man and a Woman” lived to face another day . . . and to make a lousy sequel. Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn didn’t have to blow up into glorious splinters for “The African Queen” to be enduringly romantic.

Ironically, the less explicit screen lovemaking is made, the more romance seems to flourish. We can smile now as the camera goes discreetly behind the fireplace flames in “Devil in the Flesh,” but we didn’t need to be there to feel what went on between Gerard Philipe’s impassioned schoolboy and Micheline Presle’s married woman. Vivien Leigh’s smile on waking the next morning and Clark Gable’s tender bravado as he carried her up the stairs the night before were quite enough in “Gone With the Wind.” We didn’t need loosened corset laces or groaning bedsprings.

“Don’t Look Now,” which is a high-water mark in sensuality, isn’t exactly romance: It’s elegant lust, probably the most stirring I can ever remember on a screen. It’s heightened by our knowledge that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland are in love (married, no less), and its erotic intensity is fueled by the fact that it’s an act of enormous caring, a bridge back, in fact, after the loss of a child, but it’s erotic, not romantic.

Actually, “Don’t Look Now” is in its own class, distinctly apart from all those acres of exposed flesh, those gallons of sprayed-on sweat that seem to have engulfed us since the days of Brigitte Bardot and Barbarella. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is the closest fusion of the erotic and the romantic that we’ve had recently, although its married hero’s compulsive philandering cuts right against the grain of real romanticism, which prefers the faithfulness of the turtledove.

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The late ‘30s and ‘40s, years when idealism was at its height, were the ideal breeding grounds for this sort of pure romance, but there seem to be little stirrings among ‘80s audiences that romance, not southern exposure, is closer to what they’re looking for, after almost a decade of celebration of the status quo.

The swooning success of “Wings of Desire” was one of the early warning signals; the sigh that I’ve heard as Arthur Clennam comprehends (at last!) that Amy Dorrit truly loves him in “Little Dorrit” is another. “Crossing Delancey” is made on an almost classic romantic mold and it worked rapturously well, and I think “Tequila Sunrise’s” success with audiences comes from their yearning for the great romantic triangle again. (You might notice that the explicitness of its hot-tub love scene is muted enough for the romantics yet explosive enough for the sensualists.) So as baby boomers turn nesters and parents; as, one decade down, weddings are being celebrated with the sort of frothy fervor of the late 1940s, all the signs for a romantic revival seem to be upon us. And luckily enough, this swing comes at a time when the core of really romantic American directors seem to be flourishing, led by the greatest romantic of them all, Woody Allen. (We’ll survive “Another Woman”--there will be more and better coming, you can bet on it.)

That impassioned group would include Alan Rudolph (“Choose Me,” “Trouble in Mind”), Jim Jarmusch (“Stranger Than Paradise,” “Down by Law”), Robert Towne (“Personal Best,” “Tequila Sunrise”), Philip Kaufman (“The Right Stuff,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,”) Sydney Pollack (“Tootsie,” “Out of Africa”), Robert Benton (“Places in the Heart,” “Nadine”), John Cassavetes (everything), and, on an intermittent basis, Robert Altman (“Fool for Love”).

All of which means that when the impressionable youngsters of the ‘80s get misty-eyed, they may have a little more to pick from than “Risky Business” or “Flashdance.”