| The 10 Essential Romance Films
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 | By
Al Weisel
CDNOW Senior Editor, Movies
The most popular subject for literature, popular songs, and
the movies is love. Romance has been the theme of some of the
most beloved movies ever made. But a great romantic film is
not only about two people falling in love, it also creates a
heightened atmosphere around these characters, letting the
audience feel a bit of what the characters feel, that they are
somehow on a different plane of existence. A filmmaker might
accomplish this through dialogue that's more poetic or wittier
than normal conversation or by placing the lovers in exotic
settings or by photographing them in a particularly beautiful
way. A successful romantic film is realistic enough that the
audience can identify with the characters but at the same time
might have the quality of a dream.
But while romance films may often show an idealized world,
that doesn't mean the lovers will live happily ever after.
Some of the most engaging love stories tragically don't work
out. Often this poignant end is evident right from the
beginning, and what makes these films so moving is how the
lovers struggle against circumstances. Some of these films are
set in wartime or other trying periods in history or are
between people who come from such divergent backgrounds that
the very fact that they are able to bridge their differences
in the first place is a triumph. In recent years a number of
films dealing with gay romances have featured characters who
must deal with the added problem of the disapprobation of less
enlightened members of society in such films as My
Beautiful Laundrette, Get
Real, and Beautiful
Thing, while other films, such as Ali:
Fear Eats the Soul have dealt with the once taboo
subject of interracial romance.
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| 1. Brief Encounter (1946) |
 Director David Lean takes a simple story of two
unextraordinary, middle-class people and transforms it into a
grand operatic tragedy of lost love. Laughing in smoky cafés,
running through rainswept streets, and kissing amidst the
billowing steam of locomotives racing by, the lovers, a
housewife (Celia Johnson) and a doctor (Trevor Howard), savor
their brief moments of bliss set to the romantic music of
Rachmaninoff, before circumstances intervene.
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| 2. Casablanca (1942) |
 As
World War II rages around them, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid
Bergman recall their brief affair and try to recapture the
past in a gin joint in Morocco. Bogart's cynical café owner,
Rick, must choose between rekindling his love with Bergman's
Ilsa or doing the noble thing and help her leave Casablanca
with her idealistic husband (Paul Henreid). From its crackling
dialogue to its evocative settings (the café with its whirling
ceiling fans, the foggy runway) Casablanca is a
perfectly crafted film from its first line to its
last.
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| 3. Gone with the Wind
(1939) |
 Played out against the backdrop of the Civil War, this
epic story based on Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel is
full of outsize set pieces and larger-than-life characters.
Only characters as big as Clark Gable's cynical war profiteer
Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh's scheming southern belle
Scarlet O'Hara would not get lost in a film that contains such
monumental scenes as the Burning of Atlanta. One of the most
popular movies ever made, Gone With the Wind is
Hollywood at its most extravagant and
entertaining.
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| 4. Beauty and the Beast
(1946) |
 One of the most beautiful films ever made, Beauty
and the Beast, directed by poet Jean Cocteau, unfolds like
a dream. When Belle wanders into the enchanted castle of a
prince who has been turned into a beast, candelabras held by
living hands coming out of the walls light up as she walks by.
At first repelled by the beast, she soon learns to love him.
Shot in gorgeous black and white, Beauty and the Beast
is one of the finest examples of what's been called the "magic
of cinema."
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| 5. Annie Hall (1977) |
 Using flashbacks, animation, and fantasy sequences
Woody Allen tells the semi-autobiographical story of a love
affair between a stand-up comic and a singer (Diane Keaton)
from the beginning of their relationship to its bittersweet
end. Uproariously funny and deeply sad, Allen's most personal
film comes closer to illuminating what makes two people fall
in and out of love than any film ever made.
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| 6. Wings of Desire (1987) |
 Made two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wim
Wenders' magical film, about angels who overlook the divided
city and listen silently to the secret thoughts of its
inhabitants, is shot in sumptuous black and white when we are
seeing the angels' point of view, and color when we are among
the living. When one angel falls in love with a circus
performer, he sheds his wings to be with her. This lyrical
film features soaring camera work that looks as if it were
shot by angels; a poetic, moving script; and a touching cameo
by the very human and funny Peter Falk, playing
himself.
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| 7. The Philadelphia Story
(1940) |
 This witty romantic comedy stars the edgy Katherine
Hepburn as a spoiled Philadelphia Main Liner, suave Cary Grant
as her socialite ex-husband, and down-to-earth Jimmy Stewart
as a gossip magazine reporter who helps Hepburn find her
heart. Director George Cukor brings out the best in his actors
and strikes the perfect balance between the clever
screenplay's screwball comedy and classy social
satire.
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| 8. Roman Holiday (1953) |
 This story of a cynical but ultimately chivalrous
reporter (Gregory Peck) who spends a few days with a beautiful
young Princess (Audrey Hepburn) amidst the photogenic sights
of Rome, is a modern fairy tale. Hepburn won an Oscar for
this, her starring debut, as the vulnerable but graceful young
princess who gets one brief fling at a normal life before duty
calls her.
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| 9. The Way We Were (1973) |
 It
would be hard to think of two people more different than the
WASPy jock writer and left-wing Jewish agitator whose love
affair from the Depression through the McCarthy era is the
subject of this film, or for that matter, the actors who play
them, Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. But it's the
frisson caused by those differences that make this story so
engaging -- and so tragic when it all falls apart. With
Streisand's haunting title song and its melancholy, nostalgic
coda, The Way We Were will have your tear ducts working
overtime.
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| 10. The Crying Game (1992) |
 Neil Jordan's film about the relationship between an
IRA terrorist and a torch singer is not your usual love story.
Although the film was renowned for the "secret" that puts this
affair in a whole new light, the message of the film is much
deeper than a plot gimmick. Love and desire, the film says,
cannot be contained within the simple boundaries that the more
conservative elements of our society try to circumscribe
around them.
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