User Reviews

While Billy Wilder idolised Ernst Lubitsch (he worked on the script for that director's Ninotchka), he did not have his tenderness and romantic charm. Audrey Hepburn is lovely in this movie, but it is painful to see her opposite Gary Cooper, who was nearly 30 years older than she and looks in bad shape for his age.

When Hepburn began her career, the Hollywood studios had a lot of male stars in their forties and fifties and sixties who had been popular before World War II but had not developed young male stars. So Hepburn was paired with these much older men--Humphrey Bogart in the so-so Sabrina, Fred Astaire in the charming Funny Face. This movie is distasteful and unpleasant, not just because Cooper's character is so much older but because he is an immature, vulgar boor. He shows up at the opera with another woman and, when his date goes to the ladies' room, sees Hepburn in the lobby and makes a date with her, and tells her that he is at Tristan and Isolde by mistake--he thought he was getting tickets to the Folies Bergere! (If he meant this, he is an idiot; if he meant it as a joke, he has a puerile sense of humour.) When his date returns, he winks at Hepburn behind the woman's back.

At another point in the movie, he is caressing Hepburn in his hotel suite when the phone rings and it is twins with whom he has been sexually involved in the past. In front of Hepburn, he makes a date with them, causing her to leave the room in distress.

One could go on and on, but I think this is enough to establish the point. Treating any woman like this is disgusting. Treating Audrey Hepburn like this--the most exquisite, delicate woman ever to have become a film star--is unbelievable. It is like watching someone kick a puppy. The rave review for this film in the NY Times when it first appeared is an illustration of the male chauvinism of the time, and the comments here from people who think it is a delightful romantic film show that this condescension to women and contempt for their feelings is still with us.

Wilder had some talent for romantic comedy, but his heart was really in the sordid and nasty, as in such masterpieces as Ace in the Hole or Sunset Boulevard. The ending of this film might have been intended as a homage to the ending of Lubitsch's film Cluny Brown, but is in fact a clumsy imitation of it. Both films end with the same device for bringing the hero and heroine together at the very last moment, but in Cluny Brown (with Jennifer Jones and Charles Boyer) the device was extravagantly romantic, and you felt thrilled that the two of them were together. In this film, the scene feels completely phony and you think, oh, dear, poor Audrey is letting herself in for a lot more mistreatment and humiliation.

It seems so many of the responses are hung up on Gary Cooper's age, forgetting that in his time (late silent era through to the late 1950s), Gary Cooper was widely regarded as one of the most attractive movie stars to grace the silver screen. To be sure, he was in ill health at the time of filming "Love in the Afternoon" and looked, indeed, older than 56 or 57. But he brought with him nearly 30 years' worth of outstanding leading man movie credits, and so it was the aura of his romantic film star reputation that he brought to his role as the devil-may-care American businessman playboy who is brought to heel by the naive charms of the ineffably beautiful Ms. Hepburn. Yes, it was clearly a role intended for Gary Grant (that would have to wait for "Charade"), but Cooper brings his own plain homespun American style to the role, which plays awfully well against Hepburn's dreamy child-woman European sophisticate-in-training. And "Love in the Afternoon" has simply one of the most romantic train station scenes ever filmed. When, at the last possible moment, Cooper scoops Hepburn up off the platform and Wilder shoots that close up of their kiss in the train's cabin, with Coop's big hand tenderly embracing Hepburn's stunning teary-eyed face -- well, folks, that's romantic film-making par excellence.

Ok, it is the first time i write a review and i am shocked. The treatment of the dog in the movie is almost abusive! The movie is sweet, certainly not sabrina or roman holiday level sweet but cute!

Ariane Chavasse, daughter of a French detective, loves to read her father's private dossiers... She becomes fascinated with the file concerning American playboy millionaire Frank Flannagan and a certain Madame X... She soon learns that Monsieur X has sworn to kill the American, so she goes to his hotel suite to warn him... Flannagan, intrigued by the attractive mysterious girl, dates her for the following afternoon... Ariane is captured by his sophistication, and a succession of many 'afternoon rendezvous' follows...

Concealing her identity, Ariane tells Frank of the many lovers in her past... He now becomes concerned about her... One day, in a steam bath, Flannagan meets Monsieur X, who advises him to consult detective Chavasse... He does, asking the detective to find out about the mysterious girl...

Reunited with Billy Wilder, Audrey Hepburn once again finds herself cast opposite a father figure in the person of Gary Cooper... Their vehicle is a gay comedy that derived from a Claude Anet novel called 'Ariane,' and it had been filmed twice before... Both adaptations clung to the novel's concept of an innocent young girl's winning over a middle-aged Don Juan by pretending a romantic past of her own to equal his, and eventually reforming him altogether...

With the most popular French entertainer of the last century Maurice Chevalier as the loving father, and John McGiver as the jealous husband, and considering its slight plot, 'Love in the Afternoon' maintains an atmosphere of sly charm and amusing details that almost sustains the film's length...

Director Wilder is helped immensely by the luminous black-and-white photography of William Mellor and by musical composer Franz Waxman, whose various arrangements of the movie's long-playing leitmotif 'Fascination' lend so much to the resulting effect...

I expected to like this film...Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn, Billy Wilder, Paris...But I was disappointed by its cynical manipulation and totally contrived ending.

The great age difference between Cooper and Hepburn, made even more so by the fact that she's supposed to be a young student in this film (making him more like her grandfather), was remarked on, I believe, in some contemporary reviews. But this is not a reason to find fault with the relationship. It's more that it is difficult to understand how an intelligent young woman, albeit one who is somewhat naive and romantic, could be infatuated by, continue to be beguiled by, and eventually fall in love with the unpleasant lecher played by Cooper. Despite the charm that Gary Cooper has shown in many of his films, here he seems...well, tired and not really acting as though he at all believes in the rancid character he's playing, and he's right.

The premise of the film is sour and cynical and the farce doesn't work. The ending injects a jarring sentimental note that only confirms the earlier implausibility of the "relationship" that the script would have you believe the two leads have. Doesn't work.

Audrey Hepburn is her usual magical self, but even she can't make me believe in her character. She is certainly worth watching, however, for the moments when she is, indeed, someone who might appeal to the Cooper character as more than a one-night stand.

Maurice Chevalier is surprisingly appealing here and doesn't lay on the French accent and mannerisms that he continued to polish over the years. But, again, he's done in by the script. In his very last scene in the film, he does a total flip-flop in point of view, again demonstrating the screen writers' (Wilder and Diamond) manipulation to ensure a romantically satisfying and totally unbelievable ending.

So...nice musical score, lovely black and white cinematography, a charming Hepburn, an appealing Chevalier...but a Wilder misfire, big-time.