Movie	Year	Director	Actor	Actor	Ranking
The Age of Innocence	1993	Martin Scorsese	Daniel Day-Lewis	Michelle Pfeiffer	2
All This, and Heaven Too	1940	Anatole Litvak	Bette Davis	Charles Boyer	18
Holiday Affair	1949	Don Hartman	Janet Leigh	Robert Mitchum	32
The Best Years of Our Lives	1945	William Wyler	Dana Andrews	Teresa Wright	46
Something Wild	1986	Jonathan Demme	Melanie Griffith	Jeff Daniels	89

Real life Wendell Corey isn’t my ideal mate. Aside from the whole “he’s a guy” thing, Corey was an alcoholic who died young from cirrhosis but not before he was a Barry Goldwater supporter. Movie Wendell Corey isn’t really my idea of an ideal mate either, but I get the appeal. Let’s say that you’re Janet Leigh in Holiday Affair, you have a little boy who never knew his military father, and you’re not trying to be a single mother forever. His prospects will be better if you have a husband; you’re a beautiful woman. Wendell Corey is a lawyer who is taken with you and is prepared to marry you New Year’s Day. It makes sense, and as ever, Corey isn’t playing some devil. He’s not adroit with Connie’s son, Timmy, but he hardly seems the type who is going to insist on sending the brat off to military school so he can capitalize on his time with the boy’s mother. The onboarding process will be rocky, but Connie can hope that the payoff with Carl is immediate. It’s not romantic, but for a woman who doesn’t believe that she can fall in love a second time, romance is not entirely within the equation to begin with.

Holiday Affair has some territorial hissing between its two rival toms, Steve and Carl, but it’s a movie which has a basically salutary approach to being with the wrong person. There’s an art to this in movies, where we’re supposed to root wholeheartedly for the bigger star encroaching on another smaller star’s romantic turf, but we also have to believe that the third star could have good reasons for being with the smaller star in the first place. Think of the poor Baroness from The Sound of Music. It’s not hard to understand why the Captain would fall for her, this cultured, beautiful woman. But alas that in the war between Eleanor Parker and Julie Andrews, Eleanor is not likely to win no matter how desirable she might be in a vacuum. Wendell Corey is no Eleanor Parker, and Carl the lawyer is much less graceful in defeat than Elsa the baroness, but the principle holds in this aspiring working-class kind of way. The trouble for Carl is, rather as the trouble was for Elsa, that Steve is worlds better with the offspring. Maria dutifully tames and then charms the captain’s seven dwarfs. Steve uses an electric train set to show his good will to Timmy, and it proves a point to the boy that Carl never proved. Connie’s loyalty to Carl becomes affection for Steve, and Carl bows out understanding that he can no longer pretend to be the object of Connie’s real love. She was with the wrong person. Her heart wants this gentle, observant lug who’s one bad day away from being some drifter. The movie is not even all that shy about connecting this veteran she’s falling for and the buried veteran she never gave a proper goodbye. Steve is a continuation of a love that she’s already known. Her heart wins and the theater cheers.

The frankness of Holiday Affair is at the center of that film’s emotional success. The stakes are plain, the timeline is implacable, and Connie chooses the right man once Carl frees her to do so. The Best Years of Our Lives, a film with two other couples to choose from besides the one I’ve highlighted, also uses frankness and celerity to show us who the right person is. What keeps Homer and Wilma apart is Homer’s self-deprecating pride. What keeps Al and Milly at arm’s length through much of the film is Al’s gruff demeanor and developing dipsomania. What keeps Fred and Peggy apart is a little bit more difficult to cut through by the standards of 1945. He’s married. He’s one of those geniuses who fell for a girl (or pushed her over onto the bed and then fell, maybe) and married her in a hurry before shipping out. To marry Marie, Fred Derry did not tarry.

The key character I’ve spent the least time thinking about in The Best Years of Our Lives is Marie, which is, given the movie’s moral leanings, not surprising. The film wants us to think about Peggy and not Marie, to think about the pure virginal offering of a kind young woman rather than the dubious tenderness of a blonde who prefers to trip the light fantastic. If there had been no war, or if Fred had been 4-F, would Marie have always been the wrong woman for him? Clearly there was an attraction between the two beforehand. Could the thrill of a policeman’s uniform have given Marie the thrill that the soldier’s uniform did? Fred was the soda jerk with the squarest jaw in Ohio before the war, and Marie was a party girl. Is it so incredible to think that they might have fit together in a kind of hopeless tango set to a big band sound? The movie isn’t friendly to Marie, but Marie is not in a friendly situation. The man she married (and not without his consent) has broken the terms of the deal as she understood them, and her adjustment to this guy with PTSD and a newfound taste for leadership is a steeper curve to navigate than his to a woman who hasn’t changed. They’re both with the wrong person romantically, as it turns out. Marie wants someone who can continue to give her a good time, a person who can fill her need for brassy thrills. Fred wants someone who can wipe his sweaty brow and pat his shoulder reassuringly, someone who he might only forget is his sister a couple times a month. If Marie is wrong for Fred because she cannot support his endeavor to ennoble himself, then Fred is wrong for Marie because he is just as helpless in evolving her into a socially admirable woman. Fred may not have always been with the wrong person, but after his discharge he needs his wife’s opposite.

It’s possible to look at Marie and Fred and think that once they might have been a good pair, even if it isn’t really the kind of pair that cements a happy marriage. I don’t know how one can look at the Duc and Duchesse from All This, and Heaven Too and see any chance for these two late aristocrats to have any path towards a good marriage. What unites them is their son, although it’s a difficult union, a knot tied with two lengths and materials of rope. The daughters, who are older and regrettably female, are the source of less joy and less tension. It’s the son, youngest and weakest, who needs and gets the attention of the entire household. Enter Henriette, one of those governess types who separates herself from the mistress by being superior to her in all facets. This is, for the record, not like the Baroness and Maria in The Sound of Music, even if the facts of the case are superficially similar. It’s not difficult to imagine finding the Baroness’s coy, collected personality more appealing than the governess’s thumbsy enthusiasm; heck, if you’re more attracted than Parker than Andrews from a purely physical perspective, who can say you’re wrong? But All This doesn’t make it easy to find a way to believe that there’s much to recommend Fanny when Henriette is in the reach of Charles’s arms. Henriette is better with the children, prudent, practical, prepared. She is stable even as the walls are beginning to fall in around her, as the mutual feeling between her and her employer becomes impossible to deny to herself, to him, and to others. While she is still ostensibly just the governess, it seems that one may as well try to capsize her as to capsize an island.

Fanny is the opposite of all of these things; Barbara O’Neil is giving a great performance in this movie because she finds ways to remove any trace of sympathy we might have for the mother of four and wife of some years. What attractiveness she might have is flooded away by some attempts at fashion. The most memorable pose of the Duchesse is standing up, chest and head forward like an ostrich, making similar sounds. (Bette Davis is upright or bent over a bed or bassinet most often; she is geometrically pleasing rather than s-curved, facing life rather than trying to dodge it with her torso.) A husband with an s-curve posture of his own might not have made the marriage any more amicable, but at least those people could hook together even if it were accidental. Charles is as upright as Henriette, and their romantic mettle is tested primarily through crisis. When Reynald falls very ill in the early going of the film (because of Fanny’s poor judgment, precipitated by jealousy), the mother is quickly banned from the nursery and Henriette and Charles go into high gear to do what they can for the little boy. Henriette is most responsible for Reynald surviving the initial onslaught of fever, and thus is most responsible for Charles falling for her. Davis is not handsome enough for Charles Boyer, which would be true for virtually anyone else who ever walked this earth. But it is not her comeliness which appeals to the Duc. He is, for all of his obvious virility, at the point of his life where his status as father is what compels him the most. Perhaps Fanny was sufficient to him in the past for whatever purposes she may have served, but Charles falls in love with Henriette while she’s trying to save his son’s life. In this place of middle age, he wants someone to share a bed with who will rise easily in the middle of the night when she hears one of their children whimper from a nightmare. He’s with the wrong person; the woman he’s with now needs someone to comfort her for minutes, hours, and by the time either parent can reach the child, she will have fallen asleep again.

If I were one of those people who thought that the Ray Liotta piece of Something Wild enriched the film rather than deflated it, I think I’d have to declare it a minor masterpiece. It’s a very good Liotta performance, but it appears in the movie with the suddenness of a pedestrian walking out between cars, and without the dramatic tension that would supply. (Do you love Ray Liotta as a tremendous psychopath trying to express his desire for a woman? Try Unlawful Entry, where Liotta has developed himself more and the cartoon of a stalker has been replaced with an uncomfortable woodcut.) A better question from Something Wild is who the right person to fall in love with when there are only two pairs of sexy parts to go around.

Lulu doesn’t literally kidnap Charlie, but she picks him up with the firm hand that I use to pull my cat out of the sink when he’s scrounging. She does handcuff him to a bed; she does have sex with him while he’s handcuffed to the bed; she does call his office while she’s having sex with him. Is that wrong for Charlie? Watching this dining and dashing banker bail on lunch because he’s looking for “cheap” thrills is frustrating. There is a sweet, voyeuristic justice in what happens to Charlie because he is completely out of control once Lulu comes by in her enormous, swerving car. Charlie couldn’t really belong to The Bonfire of the Vanities, let alone The Wolf of Wall Street, though I suppose if you took a wide enough tangent you could find him in the fluorescent basement of some third-tier firm. He’s an aspiring master of the universe who can’t even be the master of this diner he’s hustling, let alone the master of the bedroom he gets corraled into like a dazed pony.

For all of her charms and her sexual justice and her fiery persona, Lulu is not the right woman for Charlie. Like a mayfly, Lulu can only persist for so long in reproducing and recreating before she has to disappear into the mud. Charlie has already been married; the hope of a long-term relationship is still within him, even if his fitness for such a relationship is questionable at best. Yet he still passes the first test. After Lulu, Audrey appears. Lulu had obviously false black hair, an incredible sense of fashion. Audrey is blonde, smaller in dresses than she was in her Spirit Halloween chic back in New York. A glance at her suggests that most American definition of womanhood: “corn-fed.” Chivalrously, Audrey has decided that Charlie has adequately proved himself on the first field of battle, and is now giving him a first chance to prove that he’s right for her second persona. In the play she’s living, The Taming of the Prude, Audrey discovered that Charlie would bend to Lulu. She’s a costume that she could take up again, rather like someone might repurpose a piece of her Halloween costume for a midweek day in March. Audrey comes home and fairly melts into Charlie, who, with some hiccups here and there, ultimately proves he deserves the nice girl the way he proved he deserved a cuffing to a hotel bed. For a few hours Charlie is with the wrong person, so to speak; the one he is supposed to be with was hiding.

No film has ever attained the heights of miserable triumph like Brief Encounter, although if there were an international competition to decide the silver medal, America ought to send The Age of Innocence. What makes this movie hurt so deeply is that maybe Newland Archer is exactly where he’s supposed to be. Maybe the dilettante really ought to be with the kind, doe-eyed, and manipulative woman who wins his fidelity in the end. Perhaps it’s what he deserves for not running out to the lighthouse regardless of what direction Ellen is facing as the boat drifts past it.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us,” Fitzgerald wrote five years after The Age of Innocence was published. “It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…” The Age of Innocence does not believe in the green light. It believes in the amber sunset. Tomorrow we will put our arms down and come up lame mid-stride. Like Newland at the end of the film, we will be unable to do so much as mount the stairs to a lover unimpeded by anything except his memory. That man deserves May Welland as much, I think, as May Welland Archer deserves him. But at the same time, that man is a ghost.

In a story which predates both Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, May commits a murder, euthanizing a sick man. In 2 Kings, Ben-hadad, the king of a nation in what is present-day Syria, asks his servant to seek the prophet Elisha to ask if he will recover from the illness that has laid him low. The servant Hazael returns, perhaps goaded by Elisha’s response that the king will recover but will not live, places a wet cloth over Ben-hadad’s face, suffocates him, and succeeds him. The scene where May traps Newland, capturing him for good, is the marital retelling of Hazael and Ben-hadad. Even if Newland deserves May, there is no question that his heart’s darling, the object of his romance and the recipient of a greater passion, is Ellen. The longing between Newland and Ellen is palpable, so palpable that it disturbs all of New York with the little puffs of windy gossip that travel the streets like so many icy gales knifed Gilded Age Manhattan. Their secrecy is openness, their attempts to conceal their feelings from one another and then to conceal their feelings from their society feeble. It’s a passion with blinding force, the power of the sunset illuminating, obliterating the waters off Rhode Island.