This period drama was a departure for Scorsese, until then known primarily for street, gang, and Mafia movies. Rodgers and Hart, in their song “Isn’t It Romantic?,” describe the feeling as “music in the night, a dream that can be heard … moving shadows write the oldest magic word.” Those moving shadows are movies.īeautiful and grave from the first strains of Gounod’s Faust to the last ray of sun bouncing off a window, Martin Scorsese’s film version of Edith Wharton’s greatest novel gets richer with every viewing.

One thinks of William Blake’s iconic line, which sounds the bass note of Romantic poetry, “O Rose thou art sick.” That said, it is lyricism in all its textures-dark, light, aural, visual-that lifts these films to higher ground. Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious keys into a dark vein of lyricism, a place where self-sacrifice becomes voluptuous and ill. The English Patient sees the reverse.Īt the same time, high-flying ideals can become straitjackets or self-sabotage.

Casablanca, for example, sees patriotism prevailing over the love of one person. The mortal dislocations of World War II-our “Good War”-are formidably represented in the realm of the romantic. These tales frequently take place on a journey where desire is set against duty, and where love alters destiny. Others are modeled on the literary “romance,” a centuries-old genre of narrative fiction that combines adventure, idealism, and courtly love, as exemplified by King Arthur and his Round Table. Some invoke the archetypes of myth and fairy tale, diving into the deeper imaginative realms of high Romanticism, a movement enamored of mystery and nature untamed.

Movies that reach the romantic pantheon often have more at stake than a trip to the altar and don’t always end up happily.

Quite a few unforgettable love stories are in movies that don’t comfortably fit the category ( Gone with the Wind, for instance), and the contemporary rom-com, while classifiably romantic, can seem as slight as the dandelion-a sunny flowering, a puffball dispersed on a breeze. Any list of the most romantic movies-this one narrowed to movies in the English language-is going to draw sighs and harrumphs over beloved films left off.

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