Love Story

Some years back, I blogged about the Ryan O'Neal movie What's Up, Doc?. If you've seen the movie, you'll recall the final lines have Barbra Streisand telling O'Neal "Love means never having to say you're sorry", to which O'Neal responds, "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard". Audiences of the day, and I think a lot of people who are fans of old movies, would recognize Streisand's line as the tagline of O'Neal's earlier movie Love Story. TCM finally ran Love Story back in March during their programming tribute to the late Ryan O'Neal, so it gave me a shot to record it and finally be able to do a full-length post on it here.

Well, more or less full length since Love Story is one of those movies where people pretty much already know what it's about based on its reputation. Ryan O'Neal stars as Oliver Barrett IV. A name like that implies wealth and old family traditions, and you'd be right to expect that here. Young Oliver is a student at Harvard, star of the hockey team, and expected to go on to Harvard Law School, in part by his wealthy father, Oliver III (Ray Milland).

Harvard was one of the Ivy League schools that set up a complementary college for women, Radcliffe, before going officiall co-educational, and one day when Oliver goes to the library at Radcliffe to pick up a book, he meets librarian Jenny Cavilleri (Ali McGraw), doing the work-study thing to make it through college. She's everything Oliver is not: free-spirited, working-class, and Catholic. She doesn't seem to care for the rich, or for hockey either. But in a movie like this, you know they're going to fall in love.

Jenny's widower father is accepting of this despite thinking the young couple's lives together isn't going to be a bed of roses. Oliver's dad, however, is pissed. So ticked off, in fact, that he decides to cut young Oliver off from his trust fund which means that Oliver IV isn't going to be able to afford Harvard Law School and that nobody in a position of authority seems to have any understanding of this. But Jenny and Oliver get married anyway, with Jenny taking a job as a teacher to help Oliver work his way through law school.

Oliver does eventually graduate and gets a good job with a New York law firm, and would like to start a family. But for some reason, he seems unable to knock Jenny up. The reason, it turns out, is that Jenny has some sort of cinematic terminal illness, of the sort that makes her still look gorgeous by the standards of 1970 even as she's on her deathbed. Think the way Bette Davis suddenly drops dead at the end of Dark Victory, still looking like the glamorous Bette Davis of old, and you'll get the idea. (I had an uncle die of a brain tumor, and while he never looked like a picture of Hollywood glamour, he looked terrible in the final pictures we have of him.)

Love Story is the sort of movie that was a ridiculous runaway hit when it was released to theaters in 1970, and it's easy to see why. It's also the sort of movie that a lot of critics hated; again, it's easy to see why. Love Story is unashamedly mawkish and manipulative, and actively invites the viewer to go along for the ride. I tend to come closer to the critics on this, but at the same time I realize that if I had been around in 1970 I wouldn't have been in the target demographic for Love Story. If you're the sort of person into this genre of movie, then you'll love Love Story.