Billy Wilder’s 1957 comedy “Love in the Afternoon,” which I discuss in the clip above, didn’t do well at the box office. Wilder blamed, in part, his casting: “The day I signed Gary Cooper for this movie, he got too old,” Wilder said (as reported in Charlotte Chandler’s book about the director, “Nobody’s Perfect”). Cooper was fifty-six; his love interest in the movie, an innocent young conservatory student, played by Audrey Hepburn, seems about twenty (Hepburn was actually twenty-eight), and that young woman’s father is played by Maurice Chevalier, who was sixty-nine.
The story is a twist on “Madame Bovary”: here the young woman, Ariane, who lives with her father, a private eye, secretly feasts on the erotic exploits that are found in his files even while he tries to bring her up properly and keep her away from the “filth” of his work. Her mother is dead, and her relationship with her father is sweet, tender, and sentimental. (In one of the most brilliant exchanges, she tells him, “I love you very much,” and he replies, in a Gallic purr, “I love you more.”) Cooper plays Frank Flannagan, an international businessman and high-flying serial seducer whose files fascinate Ariane. Learning that one of her father’s clients, whom Flannagan has cuckolded, intends to kill him, she flies to Flannagan’s rescue and falls for him.
Even if Cooper plays strangely old, the May-December romance seems utterly plausible, even in its added erotic frisson, in the light of her rather exclusive relationship with her elderly father.
It’s the first movie on which Wilder worked with the screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond, and the force of the collaboration shows; the writing has a coruscating wit that plays out more gracefully than did the scripts of Wilder’s earlier films, and Wilder’s direction expands and lingers more patiently than it ever had. The visual gags that Wilder deploys are as stingingly cynical as ever, but here they have a newfound way with time, which they inhabit with an exquisitely controlled leisure. It’s the first of Wilder’s later and greatest films.
