I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.

When Nora Ephron first broke through as a screenwriter of romantic comedies, she was treated like an ersatz Woody Allen. While this seems like a peculiar assessment when you consider Ephron’s filmography from a modern standpoint, critics in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t seem to grasp some of the subtle touches that she brought to her acclaimed screenplays. She and Allen came from very different backgrounds and while Allen was an unrepentant Ingmar Bergman fanboy, Ephron wasn’t afraid to show some love to classic Hollywood melodramas. Her career as the Queen of romantic comedies was years in the making and by the time she published the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally… (1989), she was already one of America’s most famous wits. This was the woman who wrote “A Few Words About Breasts” in 1972 and put together the screenplay for Silkwood (1983), a Meryl Streep vehicle about radiation poisoning. When she stepped into the role that she is now most famous for, it didn’t necessarily seem like a natural fit. 

Ephron was seen as a scabrous, cynical writer during her time as a member of the New York intelligentsia, so her decision to write films about boys and girls falling in and out of love was disappointing to some. Her early efforts took on a light, humorous tone and typically ended on a positive note. There was little of the rage that seeped into Heartburn (1986) or the harsh self-deprecation that came through in her television interviews. It took some time for people to accept the idea that Ephron’s romantic comedies deserved to be taken seriously. It was with her second directorial effort, Sleepless in Seattle (1993), that she began to solidify her reputation as an auteur within the genre. She took inspiration from Leo McCarey’s Love Affair (1939) and its more famous remake, An Affair to Remember (1957), but put her own spin on a tale that was often criticized for being too sentimental and mushy. She blended droll observations on mundane aspects of everyday life with an intense belief in the almost mystical power of love. When the film became a box office smash success and permanently cemented Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as America’s favorite on-screen couple, Ephron fully hit her stride and gained enough clout to command big budgets and a high degree of artistic freedom. 

She co-wrote the screenplay with David S. Arch and Jeff Arch, and they managed to successfully streamline a story that could have become overly convoluted. The story opens with grieving architect Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) being reluctantly drawn into a discussion with a radio talk show host. Following his wife’s death, he and his son Jonah (Ross Malinger) relocated to Seattle from Chicago, but he still struggles to accept the loss of his one true love. He describes his romance with his wife to the talk show host and thousands of female listeners are deeply moved by his honest display of emotion. Journalist Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) feels as though she can relate to his feelings and impulsively writes a letter to him. She doesn’t mail it but her friend ends up sending it for her and Jonah is enchanted by the idea of Reed. Baldwin and Reed end up in relationships with other people but find themselves skirting around one another for several months and appear to have a spiritual bond that can overcome the obstacles that stand in their way. 

It is impossible to imagine this film working without the powerful chemistry between Hanks and Ryan. When they see one another for a just moment, you need to be knocked over by the strength and force of their shared emotional bond. If Ryan and Hanks didn’t invest their characters with a painful level of sincerity, this scene would be laughably stupid and the film’s delicate center would break into a million little pieces. Rather than leaving you questioning why two people who have barely communicated are passionately in love, they use this moment to sell you on the idea that these people have to be together. From that point on, the suspense becomes almost unbearable and Ryan and Hanks have us weeping into our tissues. They know how to play our emotions like a fiddle and you find yourself thanking them for it. Emotional manipulation is a talent and, like the best con-men, Ryan and Hanks never let you in on the fact that it’s all an act. 

The producers also went to the effort of plunging real money into this film and hiring the best of the best to handle the technical aspects of the production. The vaunted cinematographer Sven Nykvist brought his trademark tastefulness and simplicity to every shot. Nykvist doesn’t do anything flashy but he doesn’t have to. His guiding hand ensures that the film looks more carefully planned out than 90% of major romantic comedies. It takes you back to the 1940s, when respectable editors, cinematographers, and composers were regularly contracted to work on one of Preston Sturges’s madcap farces. Sleepless in Seattle looks polished and sleek in a way that He’s All That (2021) doesn’t. Highly accomplished industry professionals shouldn’t have to be ashamed of working on romantic comedies. If producers regularly forked out the money to hire the Sven Nykvists of the 2020s, romantic comedies wouldn’t look so worryingly bland. 

There is also the issue of nobody really being able to step up to the plate and fill the gaping hole that Ephron left after her untimely passing. Some have tried to controversially argue that Nancy Meyers is the successor to Ephron but I think it’s ludicrous to imply that Meyers is even in the same league as Ephron. She carved out her own little niche in Hollywood and critics came to understand that every writer who tells stories about nebbishy New Yorkers with complicated love lives isn’t just ripping off the Woody Allen formula. Ephron’s unique voice had a real influence on other writers and it is a sign of her genius that others have failed to successfully conjure up the spontaneous joyfulness that could be found in so much of her writing. 

Ephron is one of those writer-directors who worked on multiple entries on the list and I can happily say that the admiration for her work is completely justified. Sleepless in Seattle fully embraces romantic melodrama and Ephron cleverly exploits the insane chemistry that Hanks and Ryan share. Its greatness is undisputed and the list just wouldn’t be complete without it. 

I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.

I might look upon William Wyler’s perfectly respectable adaptation of Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ more favorably if it didn’t seem to fundamentally misunderstand the point of the book. It tries to twist a disturbing family tragedy about jealousy, greedy people who are obsessed with the British class system, into a dreamy romantic fantasy about a pretty girl who is torn between a bad boy and an upper class stiff. This reshaping of the narrative could have been successful if the screenwriters had made fundamental changes to the motivations of the characters. Rather than doing that, they kept in all of the unpleasant aspects of Cathy’s personality and refused to acknowledge the fact that she is in thrall to a classist system that severely disadvantages the man that she claims to love. In the novel, she is a complex character who struggles with all of the contradictions that come with being a wealthy British woman. In the film, she is a fuzzily drawn tart who messes around with two different for men for reasons that are never explained, before eventually becoming a suffering martyr. It makes no sense.

Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht’s screenplay streamlines a story that is arguably at its most powerful when dealing with the trauma that the troubled relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy has wrought on their ancestors. MacArthur and Hecht choose to cut Catherine Linton out of the narrative and introduce a happy ending into a story that is so beloved because it presents such a bleak view of British society. As MacArthur and Hecht tell it, Cathy Earnshaw (Merle Oberon) is a sweet, beautiful upper class young woman who grew up at the Wuthering Heights estate. She grows up alongside her classist brother Hindley (Hugh Williams) and her adopted brother Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier). She develops strong feelings for her adopted brother and is excited by the dangerous, enigmatic air that follows him around. When she comes into contact with the wealthy Edgar Linton (David Niven), she is comforted by the idea of marrying somebody within her own social class. Heathcliff is the victim of classist taunts and Earnshaw would lose her social standing if she chose to marry him. Heathcliff leaves the estate after she chooses to marry Linton and unexpectedly returns several years later as a wealthy man. He attacks and mocks Earnshaw for many years but declares that he loves her when she falls ill and suddenly dies. Her ghost haunts him until the end of his days and they are finally reunited when he passes away as an old man.

The screenwriters reconfigured the story to strip it of most of its depth and ended up endorsing the classist ideas that the novel rejects. This version of the story is a female fantasy about being desired. Earnshaw is the prettiest girl around and every man in the area wants to marry her. She gets to entertain the affections of various suitors without being accused of being promiscuous or slutty. These men are driven wild by her innate sensuality and aggressively pursue her. This was a plot device that would have been very successful at the time, as the sexually repressed young girls that this film targeted would have been subconsciously thrilled by the concept of having multiple sexual or romantic partners. In the real world, they would have been judged for dating more than three young men before getting hitched and committing to a loveless marriage.

In the world of the film, Cathy is a peculiar mash-up between the Madonna and the whore. On one hand, she is as pure as the driven snow and sacrifices her own happiness by refraining from having an affair with Heathcliff. On the other hand, the film cleverly exploits the fact that Heathcliff is a rape fantasy come to life. American women in the 1930s were conditioned to believe that sexual desire was sinful and they were wrong to take an active role in initiating a sexual encounter. This might have been what led to the creation of the ‘rape fantasy’, a somewhat disturbing sexual fantasy that made sexually repressed individuals feel comfortable with the idea of having sex. If their sexual partner was the one who initiated sexual contact, by forcing themselves onto a woman and leaving her completely powerless and helpless, the women would not have to admit responsibility for their sexual desires. Heathcliff is depicted as a violent man who is ruled by his intense, passionate emotions and he often looms above Earnshaw, which makes him appear to be an overpowering figure. Olivier is made up to look like the villain in a German Expressionist horror movie, with his thickly applied mascara and caked on foundation. The film lets people in the audience flirt with the idea of danger, whilst absolving them of any ‘guilt’ for wanting to have sex with somebody who isn’t as bland as David Niven. It’s a problematic trope and it likely stopped women in the audience from interrogating the social conditioning that caused them to feel so afraid of sex.

It also fails to properly address the class-based themes that stand at the center of the novel. Brontë suggested that obsession with the British class system could destroy people and turn them into heartless individuals who were incapable of loving one another. Heathcliff realizes that Earnshaw is essentially a Capitalist creature who will always look down on him because he is not wealthy. When she rejects him in order to marry another upper classman, he is disgusted by her and turns her into an object in his mind. He believes that he can possess her if he becomes wealthy but he has lost the pure love that he felt for her before she abandoned him in favor of another suitor. If he did marry her, they would have an empty marriage that wasn’t built on the passionate emotions that marked the beginning of his infatuation with her. When he does become wealthy, he doesn’t even experience the hollow victory of winning her. The members of the upper class still view him as a nouveau riche loser who doesn’t deserve their respect. This makes him even more resentful and hateful and he descends into madness as he is forced to contend with the fact that a person simply can’t win if they are not born into wealth in British society.

The film seems less comfortable with the idea of criticizing classism. This is partly because, like so many others film from this time period, it admires the pomp and the pageantry of upper-class Britons. American filmmakers used British Imperialism and snobbery as a representation of glamour. Working class Ohioans were meant to aspire to act like a British nobleman, before ultimately accepting their place as lower-class plebs who would have to admire jewel-laden toffs from afar. Actively criticizing Britain’s unfair class system would shatter the sheen of glamour that Hollywood was so desperate to preserve. In almost every frame of Wuthering Heights (1939), you can feel the camera asks you to lick your lips over the sight of all of the expensive items that the Earnshaws and Lintons own. The film never really takes a hatchet to their way of life or their political beliefs. It is especially when abhorrent when the film encourages the audience to see the nouveau riche, Heathcliff, as a monstrous figure who doesn’t possess the refinement or class of the families that have generational wealth behind them. Rather than seeing through the classist myth and pointing out that people aren’t special for being born into a wealthy family, it believes in the myths propagated by the upper class. This means that its ‘message’ feels incredibly muddled. You are supposed to want Earnshaw to be with Heathcliff but, on some level, you are also meant to admire the class system that keeps them apart.

I know that many consider it unfair to penalize a film for being a poor adaptation of the novel that it is based on. Some believe that evaluation and analysis of literary adaptations should not involve comparisons to the source material because film is its own medium. I think that it is fair to argue that many literary adaptations are improved as a result of their deviations from the novels that they were based on. However, I think that the film version of Wuthering Heights feels poorly written and structured as a result of the changes that Hecht and MacArthur made. You can always sense that there’s something missing when it comes to Earnshaw’s characterization and you can never really understand the thought process behind the decisions that she makes. The film would have been so much better if it had embraced the fact that the characters are unlikeable and morally corrupt. As a soppy romantic drama about a physically ill dimwit who has to live without the man she loves, it doesn’t entirely work.

The screenplay is easily the film’s biggest flaw but it is so exceptional in other regards that it makes a case for itself as a production that is less than the sum of its parts. Gregg Toland’s extraordinary black and white cinematography creates a haunting, poignant effect. He understands the gothic spirit of the novel and hints at the darkness that lies at the heart of this story. Even when the score is insisting that this is just a run of the mill story about ill-fated lovers, Toland is able to convey the madness and hysteria of the characters. Olivier also succeeds in crafting a credible version of Heathcliff. His performance launched him into cinema superstardom and established him as one of the top male sex symbols of his day. He is suitably Byronic and handsome in the role but brings a level of intensity to his performance that is sorely needed. When compared to Oberon, who has all the charisma of a dead fish, he looks like the greatest movie star of all time. All of these elements combine to turn the film into a solid piece of entertainment. You still find yourself wistfully imagining what this could have been, but it never qualifies as a hot mess.

I will be watching and reviewing all of the films included on AFI’s 100 Years…100 Passions list. The list contains the 100 greatest love stories in American cinema and I plan to consider how our views on romance and social issues have changed over the years as well as judge whether the romances in these films actually made me swoon. As a fan of the romance genre, I expect to love each and every one of the nominees but I also don’t know if I would consider all of them romantic.

For millennials, Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is actually a jaunty animated musical that featured the vocal talents of Demi Moore and Jason Alexander. Disney brought the story to life in glorious, vivid color and packaged their product as a cultural event that would educate children on the importance of studying 19th century French literature. It was one of their least financially successful 1990s musicals but it remains the best known adaptation of Hugo’s vaunted novel. It committed the sin of sweetening a story that was much darker on the page, and it lost some of the cynicism that made it such a powerful plea for tolerance and understanding. 

Some would be surprised to learn that Hugo’s novel was adapted into a major motion picture back in 1939. This was the third time that Hollywood had decided to bring the story to the big screen and in the late 1930s when studios were basing most of their major productions off of bestsellers, it made sense to bring the story back to the big screen. RKO Pictures enlisted their best and brightest to work on the film and ended up producing a lively tragedy that is infused with William Dieterle’s personal vision and Joseph H. August’s extraordinary imagery. Rather than being a staid literary adaptation that seems desperate to prove that it deserves to be taken seriously, it is energetic and completely assured of itself. 

Sonya Levien and Bruno Frank’s screenplay does streamline the story, but keeps all of the basic framework in place. It is still set in a dangerous, gothic version of 15th century France in which gypsies face discrimination and poor treatment. Esmeralda (Maureen O’Hara), is a young gypsy girl who plans to improve the public reputation of her people when she moves to Paris and begins working as a street performer. Her beauty and spirited personality capture the attention of several male admirers and this causes all sorts of problems for her. She only has eyes for the dashing Phebus (Alan Marshal), but she ends up getting framed for his murder. The hypocritical and prejudiced Frollo (Cedric Hardwicke) was horrified when he became sexually attracted to her and chose to ruin her life in an effort to prevent himself from feeling anything for her. He murders Phebus and then attempts to turn the public against Esmeralda and all gypsies. She fights to stay alive and receives support from several of her allies. Quasimodo (Charles Laughton), a physically deformed hunchback, is particularly bewitched by her and is willing to do whatever it takes to see her go free. 

Much of its power is derived from the specificity of the location design and the brilliant evocation of a puritanical society in which people are unwilling to let go of their prejudices. From the very beginning, Dieterle visually references German Expressionist classics. As in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920), it presents the city as a sprawling residential area that seems to stretch on forever. Esmeralda has fuzzy memories of the life she lead before moving to Paris and her fate is determined by the judgment of Parisian townsfolk. We are asked to imagine them as a unified body, rather than viewing them as individuals with differing thoughts and feelings. They travel in flocks and their opinions are easily swayed by church and government leaders. They will arrive like a Greek chorus and decry anybody who dares to step out of line. Their unmoving rigidity and refusal to acknowledge nuance is contrasted with the oddly shaped structures that dot the city. Esmeralda inhabits a morally ambiguous world in which nobody can ever become the sort of model citizen that local Parisians would idolize. It fully immerses you in the gothic Parisian environment and frequently succeeds at making its point through visuals alone. When the script occasionally becomes overly literal and didactic, the film can fall back on its visuals to retain an air of subtlety. 

William Hamilton and Robert Wise’s editing also contributes to the sorrowful, anguished tone of several scenes. They keep the film moving along at a nice clip, without ever rushing through the fairly complicated plot. It isn’t nearly as creaky as other 1930s literary adaptations and the film does not feature overly flashy scene transitions. The invisible editing pairs nicely with Dieterle’s direction, as it brings out some of the finer details of Dieterle’s vision. 

It might be a wonderful film, but it is more difficult to see why it is viewed as an iconic romantic drama. Alfred Newman’s florid musical compositions and O’Hara’s kitschy costumes would have you believe that this was a campy, old-fashioned romance. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Esmeralda and Quasimodo fall passionately in love with people who don’t feel anything for them, but love does not play a central role in the narrative. Political corruption and moral principles end up taking precedent over the powerful emotions that Esmeralda feels. Part of the point of the story is that campaigning and weaponizing the support of the public is more important than the will of a determined individual. This was one of the more inspired choices that AFI voters made, as the film is not very popular in the 21st century, but it isn’t exactly a love story. This is just one of many examples of AFI voters being unable to follow the criteria that they set for themselves.