Love Story - A cult film at Harvard?
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Big Magilla
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Big Magilla
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- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
- Location: Jersey Shore
Oliver's Story was released on DVD but is out of print. It should never have been in print - actually, it should never have been made!
Love Story was the must-read of the year in 1970. Erich Segal's book was actually written after the screenplay. It wasn't very good, but it was short and an easy read. Every other girl born in the U.S. at the time was named Jennifer after the "girl who died". The film, aside from a few nice snow scenes, was a dreadful bore. Ryan O'Neal and Ray Milland were borderline passable, Ali MacGraw and John Marley were dreadful. The film didn't deserve any of its Oscar nominations.
My favorite Ray Milland performances, aside from those already mentioned, were in 1935's The Gilded Lily and 1940's Arise, My Love both opposite Claudette Colbert and in Allan Dwan's The River's Edge in which he plays a rancher menaced by Anthony Quinn.
I don't see him in Tyrone Power's role in Witness for the Prosecution. At 52 he was too old to play Marlene Dietrich's "younger" husband. Dietrich was 56 at the time but was still glamorous. Milland was beginning to look his age. Even Tyrone Power at 43 was criticized for looking too old for the part.
Edited By Big Magilla on 1288356760
Love Story was the must-read of the year in 1970. Erich Segal's book was actually written after the screenplay. It wasn't very good, but it was short and an easy read. Every other girl born in the U.S. at the time was named Jennifer after the "girl who died". The film, aside from a few nice snow scenes, was a dreadful bore. Ryan O'Neal and Ray Milland were borderline passable, Ali MacGraw and John Marley were dreadful. The film didn't deserve any of its Oscar nominations.
My favorite Ray Milland performances, aside from those already mentioned, were in 1935's The Gilded Lily and 1940's Arise, My Love both opposite Claudette Colbert and in Allan Dwan's The River's Edge in which he plays a rancher menaced by Anthony Quinn.
I don't see him in Tyrone Power's role in Witness for the Prosecution. At 52 he was too old to play Marlene Dietrich's "younger" husband. Dietrich was 56 at the time but was still glamorous. Milland was beginning to look his age. Even Tyrone Power at 43 was criticized for looking too old for the part.
Edited By Big Magilla on 1288356760
But he's still one of my very favorite actors and I think his work in The Lost Weekend is one of the greatest performances ever.
I agree with you on that one, Damien.
Billy Wilder used him so effectively in both The Major and the Minor and The Lost Weekend. Too bad Wilder didn't call on him again. I think he would have been interesting in Witness for the Prosecution in the role that Tyrone Power played.
Of course, he was great in Dial M for Murder, but overall, he was underutilized.
Edited By dbensics on 1288329383
There was aNew Yorker cartoon at the time. Man and woman of a certain age are leaving a theatre showing Love Story and she's crying hysterically, saying: "Ray Milland is bald!"
Ray Milland was extremely conservative (i.e. he supported Joe McCarthy) and is said to have been a deep homophobe (although he was close pals with director Mitchell Leisen).
But he's still one of my very favorite actors and I think his work in The Lost Weekend is one of the greatest performances ever.
Edited By Damien on 1288335475
Ray Milland was extremely conservative (i.e. he supported Joe McCarthy) and is said to have been a deep homophobe (although he was close pals with director Mitchell Leisen).
But he's still one of my very favorite actors and I think his work in The Lost Weekend is one of the greatest performances ever.
Edited By Damien on 1288335475
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
He may have been considered. John Marley got a nod for the film.........maybe Milland was also promoted by the studio. Wasn't this the first film Milland appeared in without his toupee?dbensics wrote:This is very funny.
Does anyone know if Oliver's Story is out on DVD?
And, at the time, was Ray Milland considered a possible contender for a Best Supporting Actor nomination?
NY Times August 20, 2010
The Disease: Fatal. The Treatment: Mockery
By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
“WHAT can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?”
That she was ugly!
“That she was beautiful and brilliant?”
No, that she was ugly!
You won’t hear those reactions to the infamous opening narration of “Love Story” on any DVD commentary track. But later this month, when Harvard undergraduates present the movie in a cherished annual ritual, they’ll be chanting those lines and plenty of others just as barbed.
It’s been 40 years since “Love Story” was released. In that time, millions have wept over the star-crossed romance of the rich Harvard jock Oliver Barrett IV (played by Ryan O’Neal) and the poor Radcliffe bohemian Jennifer Cavalleri ( Ali MacGraw), who succumbs to an unnamed disease in one of the most beautiful demises in cinematic history. The death in January of Erich Segal, the Harvard-educated classicist who wrote both the screenplay and the original best-selling novel, has tinged his brainchild’s ruby anniversary with particular poignance.
But even as fans celebrate the current “Love Story” milestone, many others deride the film, released at the height of Vietnam and the counterculture, as maudlin, old-fashioned and just plain schlocky. The film critic Judith Crist, in a recent interview, called it “utterly loathsome.” (What she wrote at the time can’t be repeated in a family newspaper.)
Nowhere is “Love Story” more pummeled than at Harvard, the site of Oliver and Jenny’s gooey courtship. Every year the Crimson Key Society, a student organization that conducts campus tours and otherwise promotes college spirit, runs “Love Story” strictly for laughs for first-year students during their orientation. This year’s two screenings take place on Aug. 30.
“We’re looking to entertain the freshmen and help them feel comfortable in this new place,” said Maya Simon, the co-chairwoman of the Crimson Key Alumni Association.
That involves Crimson Key’s nearly 100 members sitting in the rear of the auditorium of the Science Center building and jeering the proceedings in the manner of a midnight viewing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Just before Ms. MacGraw utters the deathless catchphrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Crimson Key members loudly implore her, “Don’t say it!” At the conclusion, when Mr. O’Neal repeats her bathetic utterance, they shout, “Plagiarist!” And so it goes. At one point, Oliver enters Jenny’s dorm, learns from a receptionist that she is in the “downstairs phone booth,” and asks, “Where is that?”
“Downstairs, stupid!”
“Everybody’s fair game,” said Alix Olian, the current secretary of Crimson Key. “If you’re in the movie, you get made fun of.”
Hence Ray Milland, who portrayed Oliver’s humorless, overbearing father, invariably elicits hisses. Upon being denied a scholarship to Harvard Law School, Oliver sarcastically tells the dean, “You’ve been very generous with your time.”
“But not your wallet!”
“That’s too funny,” said Russell Nype, 90, who played the dean, in a telephone interview from Kennebunkport, Me. “It’s wonderful to be booed at Harvard.”
Crimson Key’s hallowed tradition apparently began in the late 1970s, just as “Rocky Horror” was setting the standard for cult-flick audience participation. At first, the ritual involved mere laughing and hooting. There were few, if any, punch lines.
“They didn’t have anything like that at all,” said Andrea Jane Keirstead, a teacher in Farmington, Me., who saw “Love Story” during the 1978 freshman week. “My biggest memory is of the film self-destructing at the end. Seriously, it appeared to melt. I’m pretty sure we cheered when it happened because we thought we’d be the last class to see it.”
Over the years, though, the rite has become so institutionalized that Crimson Key students now rehearse their routine several times before opening night. They engage in various bits of nonverbal business, including distributing tissues when Jenny is on her deathbed.
Members also come dressed in ’70s fashions or even as particular characters. Two of them wear tennis whites so they can ascend the stage and ape the movements of Oliver and his college roommate as they play squash. When, at the conclusion, Mr. O’Neal plunks himself down at what was then Wollman Rink in Central Park, devastated by Jenny’s ascension to the angels, his doppelgänger mounts the stage to do the same.
Most freshmen have no idea what they are in for. Among Crimson Key’s thousands of unsuspecting victims was Laurel Holland, class of 2006, who arrived at Harvard fresh from Walla Walla, Wash. “My sense of irony was not fully developed,” she recalled. “I went in to enjoy the film. Throughout the first half, I kept turning around and telling the upperclassmen to shut up, not realizing that Crimson Key was sponsoring the movie.”
Crimson Key regards its presentation as a bonding experience. “Most people have a soft spot for ‘Love Story,’ ” said Eeke de Milliano, the group’s president. “It is sentimental hogwash, but the freshmen are, I think, secretly proud to see their university on the screen.”
That sentiment eluded Raymond Vasvari, a Cleveland-based lawyer who underwent his “Love Story” indoctrination in 1983. “What struck me was the collective uncertainty of what it all meant,” he said. “You take all these people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who are suddenly stamped with the Harvard imprimatur and marched into this big, brutalist, antiseptic space with 1,600 other geeks to watch this girl die. And you’re sitting around watching people’s reactions to you. I suppose I was supposed to be made effete by the experience. Was Ryan O’Neal supposed to be my role model?”
He added: “I left because it was so sickeningly sweet. I can’t believe that suicide rates in the Yard didn’t skyrocket.”
The event is not entirely derisive. At various points, Crimson Key uses a laser pointer to spotlight campus landmarks and the fleeting appearance of Tommy Lee Jones (class of ’69), usually generating cheers and applause. “It was an aspect of the complicated relationship that people have with the Harvard mystique you want to embrace it, but not too seriously,” said Kermit Roosevelt, class of 1993, who now teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania. “You want to be ironic about it.”
Brian Malone, class of 1996, now a graduate student in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said he remembered the screening “as the highlight of freshman week.”
“The irreverence was so appealing to me,” he continued. “The experience instilled in me a certain condescension toward middlebrow taste.”
Not all Harvard alumni appreciate that attitude. The playwright Jenny Lyn Bader, who had her “Love Story” trial by fire in the 1980s, found it “fun and hilarious” at the time. Later, her view changed. “I think it sent a disturbing message,” she said. “There was a feeling that one needed to make fun of Harvard, and be dismissive of human emotion, and that we should establish that during Week 1 that too much tenderness would not fly in this cerebral atmosphere. It was mean-spirited.”
Ms. Bader acknowledged that her opinion is colored by personal experience. “I was one of many people admitted that year who was named Jenny,” she said.
Indeed, the single biggest source of jokes is undoubtedly Ms. MacGraw’s alter ego, Jenny Cavalleri. Howls of disgust greet her when, during the blizzard scene, she falls on her back and spreads her arms and legs to make a “snow angel.” And her assertion that her class in “Renaissance polyphony” is “nothing sexual” elicits a chorus of “Neither are you!” Crimson Key makes no apology for mocking an abrasive character who constantly puts down the love of her life as a “preppie” and punctuates her speech with a vulgar barnyard epithet. “She’s quite mean, and we just latch onto that,” said Peter Giordano, who helped organize the screening in 2003. “Even though she does have some redeeming features, we don’t let go of her.”
Ms. MacGraw has long been aware of Crimson Key’s snarkiness but considers it “very entertaining.”
“Of course they are going to pick on Jenny or is it on the actress playing her?” the 72-year-old actress asked in an e-mail. “I have had decades in which to wonder how on earth I managed to say ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’ without once asking our wonderful director, Arthur Hiller, what exactly it meant.”
Not long ago, Crimson Key considered conducting a similar rite of passage with “Oliver’s Story,” the forgettable 1978 sequel to the original. The idea went nowhere.
“We couldn’t think of any lines,” said Erin Sprague, co-chairwoman of the Crimson Key Alumni Association, “because it was so bad.”
The Disease: Fatal. The Treatment: Mockery
By THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
“WHAT can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?”
That she was ugly!
“That she was beautiful and brilliant?”
No, that she was ugly!
You won’t hear those reactions to the infamous opening narration of “Love Story” on any DVD commentary track. But later this month, when Harvard undergraduates present the movie in a cherished annual ritual, they’ll be chanting those lines and plenty of others just as barbed.
It’s been 40 years since “Love Story” was released. In that time, millions have wept over the star-crossed romance of the rich Harvard jock Oliver Barrett IV (played by Ryan O’Neal) and the poor Radcliffe bohemian Jennifer Cavalleri ( Ali MacGraw), who succumbs to an unnamed disease in one of the most beautiful demises in cinematic history. The death in January of Erich Segal, the Harvard-educated classicist who wrote both the screenplay and the original best-selling novel, has tinged his brainchild’s ruby anniversary with particular poignance.
But even as fans celebrate the current “Love Story” milestone, many others deride the film, released at the height of Vietnam and the counterculture, as maudlin, old-fashioned and just plain schlocky. The film critic Judith Crist, in a recent interview, called it “utterly loathsome.” (What she wrote at the time can’t be repeated in a family newspaper.)
Nowhere is “Love Story” more pummeled than at Harvard, the site of Oliver and Jenny’s gooey courtship. Every year the Crimson Key Society, a student organization that conducts campus tours and otherwise promotes college spirit, runs “Love Story” strictly for laughs for first-year students during their orientation. This year’s two screenings take place on Aug. 30.
“We’re looking to entertain the freshmen and help them feel comfortable in this new place,” said Maya Simon, the co-chairwoman of the Crimson Key Alumni Association.
That involves Crimson Key’s nearly 100 members sitting in the rear of the auditorium of the Science Center building and jeering the proceedings in the manner of a midnight viewing of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Just before Ms. MacGraw utters the deathless catchphrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Crimson Key members loudly implore her, “Don’t say it!” At the conclusion, when Mr. O’Neal repeats her bathetic utterance, they shout, “Plagiarist!” And so it goes. At one point, Oliver enters Jenny’s dorm, learns from a receptionist that she is in the “downstairs phone booth,” and asks, “Where is that?”
“Downstairs, stupid!”
“Everybody’s fair game,” said Alix Olian, the current secretary of Crimson Key. “If you’re in the movie, you get made fun of.”
Hence Ray Milland, who portrayed Oliver’s humorless, overbearing father, invariably elicits hisses. Upon being denied a scholarship to Harvard Law School, Oliver sarcastically tells the dean, “You’ve been very generous with your time.”
“But not your wallet!”
“That’s too funny,” said Russell Nype, 90, who played the dean, in a telephone interview from Kennebunkport, Me. “It’s wonderful to be booed at Harvard.”
Crimson Key’s hallowed tradition apparently began in the late 1970s, just as “Rocky Horror” was setting the standard for cult-flick audience participation. At first, the ritual involved mere laughing and hooting. There were few, if any, punch lines.
“They didn’t have anything like that at all,” said Andrea Jane Keirstead, a teacher in Farmington, Me., who saw “Love Story” during the 1978 freshman week. “My biggest memory is of the film self-destructing at the end. Seriously, it appeared to melt. I’m pretty sure we cheered when it happened because we thought we’d be the last class to see it.”
Over the years, though, the rite has become so institutionalized that Crimson Key students now rehearse their routine several times before opening night. They engage in various bits of nonverbal business, including distributing tissues when Jenny is on her deathbed.
Members also come dressed in ’70s fashions or even as particular characters. Two of them wear tennis whites so they can ascend the stage and ape the movements of Oliver and his college roommate as they play squash. When, at the conclusion, Mr. O’Neal plunks himself down at what was then Wollman Rink in Central Park, devastated by Jenny’s ascension to the angels, his doppelgänger mounts the stage to do the same.
Most freshmen have no idea what they are in for. Among Crimson Key’s thousands of unsuspecting victims was Laurel Holland, class of 2006, who arrived at Harvard fresh from Walla Walla, Wash. “My sense of irony was not fully developed,” she recalled. “I went in to enjoy the film. Throughout the first half, I kept turning around and telling the upperclassmen to shut up, not realizing that Crimson Key was sponsoring the movie.”
Crimson Key regards its presentation as a bonding experience. “Most people have a soft spot for ‘Love Story,’ ” said Eeke de Milliano, the group’s president. “It is sentimental hogwash, but the freshmen are, I think, secretly proud to see their university on the screen.”
That sentiment eluded Raymond Vasvari, a Cleveland-based lawyer who underwent his “Love Story” indoctrination in 1983. “What struck me was the collective uncertainty of what it all meant,” he said. “You take all these people from different socioeconomic backgrounds who are suddenly stamped with the Harvard imprimatur and marched into this big, brutalist, antiseptic space with 1,600 other geeks to watch this girl die. And you’re sitting around watching people’s reactions to you. I suppose I was supposed to be made effete by the experience. Was Ryan O’Neal supposed to be my role model?”
He added: “I left because it was so sickeningly sweet. I can’t believe that suicide rates in the Yard didn’t skyrocket.”
The event is not entirely derisive. At various points, Crimson Key uses a laser pointer to spotlight campus landmarks and the fleeting appearance of Tommy Lee Jones (class of ’69), usually generating cheers and applause. “It was an aspect of the complicated relationship that people have with the Harvard mystique you want to embrace it, but not too seriously,” said Kermit Roosevelt, class of 1993, who now teaches law at the University of Pennsylvania. “You want to be ironic about it.”
Brian Malone, class of 1996, now a graduate student in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said he remembered the screening “as the highlight of freshman week.”
“The irreverence was so appealing to me,” he continued. “The experience instilled in me a certain condescension toward middlebrow taste.”
Not all Harvard alumni appreciate that attitude. The playwright Jenny Lyn Bader, who had her “Love Story” trial by fire in the 1980s, found it “fun and hilarious” at the time. Later, her view changed. “I think it sent a disturbing message,” she said. “There was a feeling that one needed to make fun of Harvard, and be dismissive of human emotion, and that we should establish that during Week 1 that too much tenderness would not fly in this cerebral atmosphere. It was mean-spirited.”
Ms. Bader acknowledged that her opinion is colored by personal experience. “I was one of many people admitted that year who was named Jenny,” she said.
Indeed, the single biggest source of jokes is undoubtedly Ms. MacGraw’s alter ego, Jenny Cavalleri. Howls of disgust greet her when, during the blizzard scene, she falls on her back and spreads her arms and legs to make a “snow angel.” And her assertion that her class in “Renaissance polyphony” is “nothing sexual” elicits a chorus of “Neither are you!” Crimson Key makes no apology for mocking an abrasive character who constantly puts down the love of her life as a “preppie” and punctuates her speech with a vulgar barnyard epithet. “She’s quite mean, and we just latch onto that,” said Peter Giordano, who helped organize the screening in 2003. “Even though she does have some redeeming features, we don’t let go of her.”
Ms. MacGraw has long been aware of Crimson Key’s snarkiness but considers it “very entertaining.”
“Of course they are going to pick on Jenny or is it on the actress playing her?” the 72-year-old actress asked in an e-mail. “I have had decades in which to wonder how on earth I managed to say ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’ without once asking our wonderful director, Arthur Hiller, what exactly it meant.”
Not long ago, Crimson Key considered conducting a similar rite of passage with “Oliver’s Story,” the forgettable 1978 sequel to the original. The idea went nowhere.
“We couldn’t think of any lines,” said Erin Sprague, co-chairwoman of the Crimson Key Alumni Association, “because it was so bad.”