2004’s The Notebook is often referred to as a peak of tear-jerking love stories, although recent critics have called the male lead character, Noah, the embodiment of toxic masculinity. With its couple tragically separated by illness, The Notebook is a story to stir emotions; however, Hollywood was making heart-wrenching plot twists many decades before. Sometimes the couples wind up together on the other side, for a quintessential “happy ending”, but sometimes they don’t get to stay together, kept apart by circumstance or death. Each story element makes for an entirely romantic, albeit not always satisfying, ending. Here are ten such bittersweet films.
Casablanca (1942)
Legendary lines like “We’ll always have Paris.” and references to the “beginning of a beautiful friendship” are staying powers in this Michael Kurtiz-helmed classic. Set in Morocco in WWII, Casablanca tells the tale of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) reuniting with an old flame from Paris, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) who’s married to Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a resistance leader. We learn through flashback that Rick and Ilsa fell in love in Paris when Ilsa believed Victor was dead, and was supposed to leave with Rick as the Germans approached Paris. On learning Victor was alive, she fled to be at his side. A bitter Rick eventually becomes sympathetic to Ilsa and Victor’s need to escape the fate of a concentration camp, and decides to help.
Ilsa and Rick’s relationship is one of sacrifice for something much bigger than them and what they want. Though she admires Victor, Rick is Ilsa’s great love, and their second parting, likely forever, is especially touching.
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Brief Encounter (1945)
A chance, ahem, encounter in pre-World War II England leads to an emotional dalliance between two people, Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) and Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), both married with children in David Lean’s Brief Encounter. Their affair begins innocently, with Alec removing a speck of dust from Laura’s eye. They strike up a friendship, comprised of outings to a refreshment room and the movies, with each feeling safe that nothing untoward will happen, knowing that the other is married. Though they admit their feelings and contemplate going to bed together, that they don’t and Alec eventually leaves so both of their families stay intact is practical and in tune with the social norms of the time. It still leaves the viewer with a sense of pity for them over what could have been.
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Roman Holiday (1953)
In her presentation of Roman Holiday for The American Film Institute’s 100 years…100 Passions list, Jennifer Love Hewitt deemed it “the perfect movie”. Given the qualities of William Wyler’s 1953 classic, it’s not hard to understand why.
Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) is an American reporter working in Italy who’s assigned to cover the visit of HRH Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn) on her European City tour. When the princess has a meltdown over her obligations, she flees the embassy and Joe finds her passed out a on a park bench. Delightful hijinks ensue, with Ann claiming to be skipping school, and Joe pretending not to know who she is. Joe believes he can, in spending the day with her, score the ultimate exclusive interview and buy his way back stateside. In their one great day together, they behave as tourists in Rome, seeing the sights and indulging in culinary delights. When she’s inevitably forced to return to her royal life, the sense of unfairness as they say goodbye is just as palpable to the audience as the characters.
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West Side Story (1961)
Generations are familiar with this New York-set Romeo and Juliet musical retelling directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. Set against the backdrop of a racially tense Upper West Side, West Side Story concerns two gangs, the Sharks and the Jets, fighting for dominance and the fleeting, passionate story of Maria (Natalie Wood) and Tony (Richard Beymer), caught in the fray. They come from two different worlds but prove they’re more alike than those around them give them credit for. It culminates in a climactic tragedy, and it’s hard not to shed a tear when it’s all over.
A signature of great love stories is sometimes the lack of a happy ending, and it’s often due to an unfortunate circumstance; in West Side Story’s case, it’s due to mutual hate and misunderstanding, and was over before it could really begin.
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Love Story (1970)
Like Casablanca’s “We’ll always have Paris.”, Love Story boasts the iconic, somewhat controversial line “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” So says Ali McGraw’s Jenny Cavilleri to Ryan O’Neal’s Oliver Barrett IV in Arthur Hiller’s classic drama.
Oliver, who attends Harvard, and Jenny, who attends the neighboring Radcliffe, meet and immediately engage in smirk-inducing, whip-smart verbal sparring. Jenny and Oliver fall quickly in love, get married, and try to start a family in short order. When they’re unsuccessful, the doctor reveals that Jenny is deathly ill. The last act of the film portrays Jenny’s decline and Oliver’s grief, underscoring the sadness of the long life together they should have had.
Before The Notebook, Love Story was the example of lovers kept apart by illness and, perhaps in handling it in a more seventies way, Oliver attempts to move on after Jenny’s death in the oft forgotten sequel to Love Story, Oliver’s Story (1978).
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A Warm December (1973)
A tender romance directed by and starring Sidney Poitier, A Warm December is about a widower named Matt (Poitier) who’s visiting London with his young daughter, Stefanie (Yvette Curtis). There he meets Catherine (Esther Anderson), a niece to an African ambassador (Earl Cameron), who’s there to negotiate the building of an infrastructure project for her (fictional) nation. As the two spend time together, Matt starts to envision a future with Catherine. Sadly, sickle cell disease is the insurmountable roadblock to this budding attraction.
Under Poitier’s direction, the film takes a somewhat soapy narrative like Love Story and turns it into something poignant. We, like Matt and Catherine, mourn what might have been, but also like them, come away grateful for the experience.
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The Way We Were (1973)
Even if two people have a powder keg of chemistry, sometimes a “till death” marriage is simply not meant to be. This is explored in Sydney Pollack’s The Way We Were, starring Barbra Streisand as Katie, a bold voice for social justice, and Robert Redford as Hubbell, a politically neutral writer. The pair have a bit of an on again-off again and eventually marry, but after some time they accept that they’re too different and divorce. It’s realistic in the sense that relationships don’t always follow a linear path with a positive resolution, and that, in spite of a promising beginning, sometimes it’s best to move on. The question posed is whether or not they were better off having known each other, and given their short but warm reunion at the end of the film, the answer seems obvious.
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Same Time, Next Year (1978)
Infidelity has long been treated in film as something scandalous or shameful or something trivial or; it’s rarely portrayed sensitively, especially if the spouses of the unfaithful couples are they themselves stepping out or are just plain bad people. Same Time, Next Year, directed by Robert Mulligan, does anything but follow one of these formulas. It doesn’t have the finite period of Brief Encounter or the casual tone of wife swapping comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969). Same Time, Next Year, adapted from a play by Bernard Slade, stars Alan Alda as George and Ellen Burstyn as Doris.
Doris and George’s story begins with a one-night stand at an inn in 1951. Over the next twenty-five years, the two continue to meet at the same inn annually, just to spend one night together. Viewers get to watch their gradually changing relationship, as they go from practical strangers to, by the end, exchanging stories about each other’s spouses and asking after them as though they too were old friends. It’s a unique take on the affair storyline, handled with refreshing sympathy.
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On Golden Pond (1981)
In the last twenty-five years, a few attempts have been made to portray love between folks middle age and older, notably Nancy Meyer (with 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give and 2009’s It’s Complicated), David Frankel’s Hope Springs (2012), and Ritesh Batra’s Our Souls at Night (2017). Romantic relationships on film have usually, more often than not, focused on stories of the young. On Golden Pond, directed by Mark Rydell, is an exception to this formula; it’s an honest study of the end of a long marriage whose flame still burns bright.
On Golden Pond takes place over a summer spent at the cantankerous Norman (Henry Fonda) and sunny Ethel (Katharine Hepburn) Thayer’s house on the lake. The first part features cozy slice-of-life scenes that make you want to join them. There are occasional moments of dementia for Norman that are saddening to watch, but they balance with the charming and persistent flirting between this nearly seventy and newly-turned eighty-year-old. When their daughter Chelsea (Jane Fonda) comes to visit with her new husband (Dabney Coleman) and step-son (Doug McKeon) in tow, dynamics are briefly shaken up as old familial wounds are reopened.
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Desert Hearts (1985)
Even today, mainstream films that prominently feature LGBTQ+ characters and couples are relatively few and far between. Still, it may surprise some that Samuel Goldwyn Films produced one such film in the mid-eighties with Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts.
Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver) is a professor who’s travelled to Reno, Nevada, in 1959 to obtain a divorce. There she meets Cay Rivvers (Patricia Charbonneau), a change operator at a casino, whose brash self-confidence and history of relationships with other woman clash with Vivian’s introverted nature. Despite their opposing personalities, they fall for one another, much to the dismay of Frances Parker (Audra Lindley), Cay’s surrogate mother, who worries that she’ll leave Reno. The film’s ending is left ambiguous, but hopeful.
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These movies are suitable for film studies classes and public library screenings alike. As is the case with any historic media, viewers should be prepared for potential language and humor which is no longer in common use. Browse through Video Librarian’s archive of classic film reviews for further inspiration.