By Peter Debruge. Chief Film Critic. In this gold-standard screwball caper comedy, a gentleman thief, a lady pickpocket and a Parisian heiress form an elegant triangle, the preferred shape of Ernst Lubitsch β that sublime architect of romantic instability β who loved to test how seemingly solid couples might respond to a good romantic upset.
The movie came out before the Production Code, and it sparkles with the kind of naughty innuendo that was soon prohibited in Hollywood, but which Lubitsch was sophisticated enough to suggest even behind closed doors. A man falls in love with a mermaid: What could be simpler, or sweeter, than that?
Amid a career of macho performances, Clint Eastwood tapped into his sensitive side to deliver one of his most indelible characters in Robert Kincaid, a National Geographic photographer on assignment in Iowa, who stops by a farmhouse to ask for directions. No matter what Allie does, he keeps on loving her in the best possible version Hollywood can make of a Nicholas Sparks novel.
You might ask: How romantic could a musical this notoriously G-rated and squeaky-clean really be? Von Trapp with an almost forbidden sense of broken decorum. And Plummer, who looks like he belongs in a far darker movie, plays the captain as a lost man literally coming back to existence. On the sidewalks of Dublin, a 30ish busker Glenn Hansard strums a guitar with a worn-out hole where the pick board should be.
Some think of it as the ultimate guilty-pleasure rom-com. Others say that its story of a wealthy businessman Richard Gere who hires an escort Julia Roberts for a week to be his public romantic partner represents Hollywood at it most reprehensibly sexist. The truth, however, falls right in between. Mira Nair took a pioneering risk in depicting the romance between Demetrius Denzel Washington , a blue-collar Black carpet cleaner, and Mina Sarita Choudhury , a young Indian woman whose family fled Uganda to the American South.
