Release Date: March 17, 1932
Running Time 68 minutes
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Dorothy Mackaill, Hale Hamilton, Astrid Allwyn
Directed by: Thornton Freeland
Love Affair can best be described as a feature length soap opera. It has all the cliches of an average episode of a daytime drama, complete with scandal, sex, infidelity, romance and blackmail. The only thing it is lacking is a cliffhanger inviting viewers to come back tomorrow for more of the same. The problem with Love Affair isn’t the formula, it’s the execution of it. With all this drama and depravity it is painfully dull, failing to bring any real excitement to the stage. The cast is game but the results are disappointing all around.
Carol Owen (Dorothy Mackaill), a wealthy socialite has decided she wants to take a flying lesson, and not just any flying lesson but one shepherded by Jim Leonard (Humphrey Bogart). Jim doesn’t care for taking on passengers so, when Carol insists on him, he intentionally flys in such a way to leave her very queasy. Later, on the ground, she gives him a life in her car, getting even by driving crazily through downtown traffic. Inexplicably the two begin seeing each other.
Meanwhile, Carol’s finance manager, Bruce Hardy (Hale Hamilton), is also in love with her. He had proposed several times but is always rebuffed, yet he persists. He also has a mistress, Linda Lee (Astrid Allwyn), an aspiring actress who happens to be the baby sister to Jim Leonard. Linda has a producer named Georgee Keeler (Bradley Page) who is promising her a big role if she can get money out of Bruce. Jim distrusts Georgee and wants Linda to settle down to a ‘real’ job. He has plans to market his own airplane engine and, if he can get financing, move the two of them to Detroit where all the manufacturing takes place. Naturally she wants nothing to do with this. The rest of the film is a series of on-again-off-again romances and a blackmail scheme that fizzles out almost as quickly as it starts.
Nearly everything about this film is rote and cliché. As mentioned above it has about as much weight to it as a typical daytime drama, drawing the romance out by throwing in conflict after conflict to keep Jim and Carol from their Happily Ever After. When it does finally wrap up it’s awkward and bizarrely staged on a plane during an attempted suicide. The flight stunts are amazing to watch but that is about it. It is ludicrous and unsatisfying. This was never going to be a great film. The problems stem from the source material, a short story by Ursula Parrott, and a faithful adaption was never going to do much for this story. But it could have been better, not relying so much on manufactured drama and instead allowed the characters time to breath and have the drama flow naturally from that. Instead it is a forgettable affair that is better off left to Bogart completists and fans of the late Dorothy Mackaill who wish to see her during the waining years of her stardom.
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