The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

At an time when people were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out and experimenting with all kinds free love and sex inspired by Woodstock, Love Story which never should have gotten an audience in that generation became the romantic film of the 70s. It still moves people in many ways. Since Erich Segal was a few years ahead of me in graduating from Midwood High School in Brooklyn you can imagine how incredibly popular the story was where I hail from. Maybe people could not identify with rich preppy kid Oliver Barrett IV but there were certainly a lot of folks who identified with scholarship kid from Providence.Who meet at Harvard and I guess opposites do attract because it really is love at first sight for Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw. Both created in Love Story the iconic parts they were identified with. Both spent their lives trying to be in something half as good.Love Story brought home one Oscar for musical scoring. The song Where Do I Begin one of the great romantic ballads of the latter half of the 20th century didn't rate a nomination. But the picture itself, Ryan O'Neal, Ali McGraw, and John Marley who played McGraw's working class father all got Oscar nods. Everyone likes a Cinderella story and this is one with a twist, the poor girl who lands a rich husband and didn't trap him to do it. O'Neal and McGraw are still iconic characters. Can you see a remake today with Ryan Gosling and Jessica Biel in the leads? I sure can, I'm surprised no one has done it.Until they do, this is as good as romance gets.

The film is kind of dated at this point, and everyone knows the plot whether they have seen it or not. However, watching it today is still an emotional experience. All relationships are different, and the quirky communication between the two main characters is often strange (albeit irrelevant, since you do see the love between them well enough). The side plot with the Barrett family adds to the character buy-in on Ryan O'Neal's performance, even if it's clear he can't act a lick. How did he get nominated for an Oscar here? McGraw isn't much better, in truth, but whatevs. The story is as timeless as "Romeo & Juliet", in essence: love torn apart way too soon. If you're not crying at the end, you're not human. As noted, the film could use more development to show the true love between the characters, especially in the beginning of the courtship. It is funny to see "Jack Woltz" in a different role here, and he's pretty good surprisingly. Overall, it's certainly worth seeing once just to say you've seen it, but after that, it can go back on the DVD shelf forever.

A silly, trivial film, "Love Story" cons too many of its viewers with its schlocky sentimentality and its idealization of the East Coast power elite. Still, it presents an interesting view of social attitudes prevalent in a 1970's Ivy League setting. "Love Story" tries to make an egalitarian nod towards an unlikely romance between a WASP scion and a poor but gifted Italian-American woman. At the same time, the film constantly glamorizes and glorifies the northeastern top-out-of-sight Anglo-American culture associated with Harvard. The beautiful cinematography evident throughout the film pays homage to Harvard and to east coast chic.Spoiler Alert:Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O'Neal) rebels against his anally retentive and classist father (Ray Milland) by marrying Jennie Cavalieri (Ali MacGraw), a working-class Italian-Catholic woman from Cranston, Rhode Island. Quel horreur! While Jennie pretends to disdain preppies, her obvious fascination with their social power is evident in her emulation of their clothing styles and her preference for WASPy men. She even claims (somewhat ironically) to "love" the number after Oliver's name. During her meeting with his nauseatingly pretentious parents the usually blunt Jennie is charmingly demure, and nearly as smooth as Sydney Poitier in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." This is a romance motivated not so much by true love, as by mutual fascination with the Other from a different side of the tracks.Jennie's class crossover from proletarian Cranston to Preppieland may have been a major source of the film's romantic appeal, especially since the myth of "movin' on up" is cherished to an extreme in America.By my lights, Jennie Cavalieri makes a horrible mistake when she gives up a fellowship to study music in Paris with the acclaimed Nadia Boulanger. Instead, she falls for the oldest myth in the book by marrying Oliver Barrett, the quintessential bland corporate type from the "right" background. In the real world, unions between working-class types and preppies rarely work due to the snobbish attitudes of the latter. It is wiser for talented people from more modest backgrounds to gain entry into the upper classes through intellectual and artistic abilities that will give them staying power, rather than through marriage alone. Had Jennie gone to Paris to fulfill her dream of becoming a concert pianist, she not only could have realized her creative potential, but she also could have eventually married a man from a more culturally sophisticated and less class obsessed background than Oliver Barrett IV. This better spouse for Jennie would also have been more appreciative of her musical gifts.The ridiculous line, "love means you never have to say you're sorry" is the dictum of a spoiled and entitled richie who uses others for pleasure and profit. When Oliver throws this line at "Papa" after Jennie's death, this relieves the eminent Mr. Barrett of any responsibility for his vile snobbery. Oliver is welcomed back into the fold only after Jennie no longer exists as a threat to the Barrett family's WASPocracy.Fortunately in the post millennial world, a rich WASP man would not be viewed as the ultimate prize for a woman like Jennie Cavlalieri, since the current bourgeois bohemian culture in America would encourage her to seek other choices. Who knows? Perhaps Jennie's immune system had an aversion to Oliver's preppy sperm -- and this caused her fatal illness.

This review is going to be brief, because what can you say about a movie about a girl who died when she was twenty five? Only that it had meticulously-crafted cinematography, witty dialogue, honest performances from O'Neal and McGraw, a perfect score, and a clichéd story line that deserved none of that. But I enjoyed the movie nevertheless, probably because I'm around the same age as Jenny in movie's exposition, and I too enjoy Mozart, Bach...and even the Beatles. I'll also add (since IMDb asks that I add more lines to this review) that I'm a big fan of Ryan O'Neal's, so pretty much any movie he's in, I'll enjoy. I'll also add (perhaps unnecessarily) that he retweeted me today and it sort of made my life.