What made Love Story a hit?: It takes some balls to title a romantic drama Love Story. In doing so, writer Erich Segal essentially threw down the gauntlet, proclaiming this to be the definitive romance for a generation. And for audiences of the early 1970s, it was embraced as an old-school romance they could call their own, both as a best-selling novel, then as a film. Love Story appealed to a wide audience- its anti-establishment message resounded with youth of the era, while attractive, clean-cut leads Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw were likable to “square” audiences. Moviegoers responded to the tune of more than $100 million, a huge figure in the pre-blockbuster era.
What happened to its popularity?: There’s a school of thought that says that cold, ironic movies tend to age better than warm, sincere ones, and while that’s not always the case, it’s pretty true of Love Story. Like Titanic (spotlighted in my last column), Love Story’s cornball tendencies became more glaring with the passage of time, making the film easy to deride. Supposedly there’s a tradition at Harvard- the setting of the film- of incoming freshman getting together to heckle Love Story. But more than that, Love Story had the misfortune of coming at the beginning of a decade that saw an unprecedented amount of adventurousness in Hollywood. Compared to subsequent hits like MASH, The Godfather, and Jaws, Love Story got lost in the shuffle.
As for its stars, McGraw quickly became more famous for her relationships- Robert Evans, Steve McQueen- than for her later work. O’Neal’s career fared better in the long run, finding him working with filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Peter Bogdanovich, but by 1978, when he starred in the film’s sequel, Oliver’s Story, his popularity had waned as well.
Does Love Story still work?: Much as I’d like to defend the film against its hecklers, the truth is that Love Story hasn’t aged well. One particularly grating element of the film is its dialogue. Great dialogue is rarely a hallmark of romantic films, but Love Story’s so overwritten that there’s hardly a point when the characters sound like they’re speaking naturally.
This is especially true of Ali McGraw’s Jenny, who begins the story by verbally strong-arming O’Neal (as Oliver) into a first date and never really lets up. Even after Oliver tells Jenny, “verbal volleyball is not my idea of a relationship,” Jenny’s dialogue still mostly comes off as self-impressed. This is a big problem when the film is largely predicated on the idea that Jenny is an irresistible life force, and McGraw just wasn’t actress enough to make it work.
But a bigger issue is how rushed it feels. The biggest casualty of the film’s abbreviated running time (just over 90 minutes) is characterization, in particular the parents of Jenny and Oliver. We know that Oliver’s relationship with his father (Ray Milland) is strained because he calls his father “sir” and his father casually says “that’s an order” when speaking to his son. Conversely, we know that Jenny and her father (John Marley) have a loving relationship because she calls him “Phil” and talks to him like a friend. This is typical of Segal and director Arthur Hiller’s approach, too often resorting to comfortable
cliché to avoid dealing with the story’s thornier issues.
With its narrative arc- rich boy falls in love with and marries poor girl, gets disowned by family, but works his way back to a well-to-do lifestyle, after which she contracts fatal disease that for some reason never changes her appearance- Love Story might have made an effective melodrama. However, the film is in such a hurry that very little makes an impression. It’s like listening to a concert pianist play a concerto in double-time- sure, he hits all the right notes, but where’s the soul?
