TOP 5 ROMANTIC MOVIE MOMENTS

​For Valentine’s Day, I round up the five moments at the movies that I fell in love with and made me fall in love…

I appreciate I’m two days late to this special Valentine’s Day-related post, but I wanted to do it anyway. Valentine’s Day is about celebrating love in all its highs and lows and there’s nothing I like more than a good romantic movie to put me in the loving spirit; chirping, chirruping and kissing the trials and tribulations of love life on the lips.

We have a remarkable shortage of Valentine’s movies this year. Perhaps that’s expected as we are under a lockdown Valentine’s Day. That’s why it got me thinking about the movies that I fell in love with and have made me fall in love. More specifically, I was thinking of individual moments from the movies that are the most romantic.

Necessarily, there are some great titles and moments that I’ve left out. I couldn’t find space for Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson’s first “brief encounter” at the train station in David Lean’s ‘Brief Encounter’ (1945), for example. There was no room for Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm in ‘When Harry Met Sally’ (1989). Or, even more recently, the planetarium scene in ‘La La Land’ (2017) with that adorably lovely coupling of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. And I couldn’t find room for the iconic phone kiss scene from ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ (1946).

These are all great titles and great omissions. But this is a top 5 list rather than a top 10 and so I had to really squeeze things down to the bare minimum with all the fat trimmed from the bones.

So here it is. My top 5 romantic movie moments…

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​5. Montage - ‘Annie Hall’ (1977)/Expectations vs. Reality - ‘(500) Days of Summer’ (2009)

You’ve got to feel a wee bit sorry for the protagonists of ‘Annie Hall’ (1977) and ‘(500) Days of Summer’ (2009). They’re weedy, shy, insecure young men in the shape of Woody Allen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and are hopelessly in love with two fabulously quirky women - Diane Keaton and Zooey Deschannel (exactly the kind of girls I’d have fancied rotten at school!). And yet, for the most part, these women don’t love them back. It’s called unrequited love and most people have suffered the heartbreak of this at some point in their life. Both these excellent movies cover the heart-wrench that comes with unrequited love. In ‘Annie Hall’, it’s in the film’s ending montage which is basically a video reel of the high points of Alvy and Annie’s relationships and how that relationship is, but a distant memory now. 

‘(500) Days of Summer’ takes a more ingenious touch to the subject by having two very similar scenarios play out split screen. Both are at a party and one ends with Gordon-Levitt’s Tom kissing Deschannel’s Summer and having sex and the other with him seeing her engagement ring and walking out in near tears. These scenes could be seen as very unromantic as they deal with when love could not be found, but they are guaranteed tear-jerkers and I love the choice of songs on the soundtrack - ‘Seems Like Old Times’ for ‘Annie Hall’ and Regina Spektor’s ‘Hero’ for ‘(500) Days of Summer’. I always love a bit of Regina…

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4. “Ashley, I love you” - ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939)

Vivien Leigh never looked more beautiful than at the BBQ at the Twelve Oaks. She has some fantastic scenes in ‘Gone with the Wind’. For example, her kiss against the red sky with Clark Gable and her “God is my witness!” speech on Tara’s soil. But the scene that always makes me blush and confirmed my crush on this Hollywood darling, Scarlett O’Hara, comes when she confesses her love to the dashing Ashley Wilkes, looking like she’s going to faint with the line “Ashley, I love you!”. Only for him to turn around and reject her. I certainly wouldn’t reject Scarlett O’Hara…

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​3. Trevi Fountain scene - ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960)

The sexiest scene of this list, certainly the sexiest non-kiss scene of all time. It involves the blonde and beautiful Anita Eckberg wading elusively into Rome’s Trevi Fountain and philandering journalist, Marcello Mastroianni, following her in and meeting her there in the middle. Film critics and historians have debated for decades over the exact meaning and metaphor behind this iconic segment of Fellini’s classic. I personally like to see the fact that the fountain stops and Marcello and Anita are the same height as symbolic of a level playing field between men and women. Something which was greatly desired at the time ‘La Dolce Vita’ (1960) was made.

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​2. La Marseillaise - ‘Casablanca’ (1942)

Everyone talks about how sexy Humphrey Bogart is in ‘Casablanca’ (1942) and how beautiful Ingrid Bergman is. But it’s actually Paul Henreid - who Tom Blyth, who I interviewed for LeftLion, played at drama school - who is the star of the show for me. His performance as Czech resistance fighter, Victor Laszlo, is so impassioned and elegant and I, of course, cannot forget the scene where he sings the French National Anthem and the crowd in the bar join him. The gaze Ingrid gives him is the source of my dreams…

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1. Kissing in the Rain - ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ (1961)

This might be the only cat kissing scene currently on film. It doesn’t involve cats kissing, but it does involve an owner kissing one on the head and then packing on further PDA with a hot man in the soaking rain. ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) may be dated in some ways (ask Mr. Yunioshi), but it does feature lovely chemistry from Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard and a fashion icon in Hepburn. Few films captured the spirit of the swingin’ sixties better and this end scene is a better kissing in the rain scene than when Andie MacDowell said “is it raining? I hadn’t noticed!”.

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