Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Adeel Hail Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

bkoganbing I have no doubt that the title of this film was changed due to the popularity of the Ryan O'Neal/Ali McGraw film of a later generation. But Love Story has certainly stood the test of time no matter what you call it.A couple of the most beautiful women of the British cinema, Margaret Lockwood and Patricia Roc of the World War II era, compete for the affections of Stewart Granger. Granger and Lockwood have some secrets that they are withholding from each other. Granger is an RAF flier on leave because his eyes were injured during a bomb explosion and he is going blind. But an untried and tricky operation might save him. Lockwood had a bout of rheumatic fever which has left her with a weakened heart that won't get any better. She's a famous concert pianist who discovers she's slowly dying when she's examined after trying to enlist in the service for war work.They meet at a seaside resort where Granger has gone back to his old trade of mining engineer looking for valuable molybdenum deposits for the war effort. In the end everybody's secrets do come out including a couple that Lockwood's rival Patrica Roc has.Almost as much a character in the film as the players is the seaside area of Cornwall. Miles from any large city where population and war industry made it a target of the Luftwaffe, the seaside of Cornwall has never been more beautifully photographed. You'll not hear a shot or a bomb, the only explosion involved is during a key sequence in an old mine. Granger's keeping his secrets and some think he's a slacker not being in the war, but he proves he has the right stuff.Love Story really cements Granger's star status in British cinema and at the end of the decade he's in Hollywood. Lockwood and Roc both had some American film credits but never attained the international status Granger did. Love Story on the other side of the pond ranks with films like Love Letters, Casablanca, and I'll Be Seeing You as great World War II romantic dramas.

murray-allison94 I love anything with Margaret Lockwood in it. Stewart Granger also had something, I think. The settings are great and the music too. I've never been to that spot where the open air concert takes place but its on my list. But mostly what I like about this film is the totally ludicrous plot. It's one of those truly whacky films of the forties where nobody tells anybody anything but the characters variously are dying/ suffering from a serious condition such as amnesia or (as here) encroaching blindness but, because they're British, they can't tell each other or anybody else. It's obviously completely bonkers but they just don't make them like it now.

writers_reign Travelling by train to Cornwall to shoot location footage Stewart Granger shared a carriage with director Leslie Arliss who asked casually what Granger thought of the script. Unaware that Arliss had a co-writer credit Granger replied succinctly 'crap'. I have little time for Granger as an actor, finding him both smug and wooden but I can't fault his critical faculties, or at least not in this case. Someone involved in the writing had clearly been blown away by One-Way Passage and thought they could do just as well. Boy, did they get a wrong number and it wasn't Cornish Rhapsody. For the record One-Way Passage featured a doomed shipboard romance between two people returning by sea to America, she to die of an incurable disease, he to be executed. The perpetrators of Love Story give us a terminally ill Margaret Lockwood opting to spend her last few months in Cornwall where she meets soon-to-be-blind Stewart Granger neither, of course, revealing the truth to the other. Tom Walls and Patricia Roc are also along for the ride and acquit themselves as well as can be expected under the circumstances. It was probably designed as escapist fodder |(it was produced in 1944) but ironically it is the audience who seek freedom.

Jem Odewahn This 1944 Gainsborough melodrama was not a costume production, yet LOVE STORY retains and builds upon many of the trademark Gainsborough elements. The film was made as a sort of morale booster/romantic escapist drama in the midst of World War Two. Looking at it today, it does seem outdated and melodramatic in many ways, yet it is still remarkably poignant in it's theme of "When you love someone, you set them free".Lockwood and Granger star together in this film, a year on from the smashing success of THE MAN IN GREY. However, Miss Lockwood is no wicked, social-climbing villianess here. Instead she's a charming pianist who learns that she has a heart condition that will soon lead to her death. Determined to make the most of what little time she has, Lockwood's character Lissa Campbell checks into a Cornish hotel. There she meets Kit Firth (Stewart Granger), a former RAF pilot who is also harboring a painful secret. He is going blind. The pair quickly fall in love, yet both cannot bring themselves to tell the other the truth. Granger's childhood friend Judy (Patrica Roc)also begins to cause trouble between the pair, as she's secretly in love with Kit.The plot is melodramatic, yet it's quite entertaining. The performances are generally good, with Lockwood showing she could play a sympathetic heroine as well as she could play a scheming bitch (THE MAN IN GREY). Granger makes an attractive lead, while Roc gets quite an interesting role. Roc was usually the second lead to either Lockwood or Phyllis Calvert in the Gainsborough dramas, yet her Judy is not the tearful milksop of THE WICKED LADY. She is a strong, independent, caring yet jealous and manipulative friend of Granger, who will do almost anything to covet his affections. Roc gets some nice catty scenes with Lockwood, and she pulls them off well.While the script descends into slush at times and some of the location work is rather ordinary (not to mention the "faking" of Miss Lockwood's concert scenes), LOVE STORY is generally an entertaining melodrama with quite a few virtues. I prefer my Gainsborough dished up with a dose of Mason and played out in Regency-era England (or Italy, in the case of the delicious MADONNA OF THE SEVEN MOONS), yet LOVE STORY is a worthy entry in the Gainsborough romantic cycle.