The opening scenes of *Love Affair* establish the film’s central tension through visual and thematic sophistication that shaped romantic cinema for decades. The 1939 version begins with passengers aboard a European cruise ship bound for New York, where two complex characters meet through a porthole window—a framing device that reflects the entire film’s preoccupation with idealized love obscured by circumstance. Michel Marnet, a playboy engaged to marry his wealthy fiancée Lois Clarke, encounters Terry McKay, a former nightclub singer being kept by her boss Ken Bradley. This setup is deceptively simple, but director Leo McCarey uses the porthole sequence to visually introduce the film’s central paradox: characters see each other as partial, framed images before confronting their full human complexity.
What makes the opening scene remarkable isn’t just the meeting itself, but how cinematographer Rudolph Maté photographs it. Irene Dunne’s face appears as a cameo necklace framed within the porthole’s circular window, separated from Charles Boyer by a wooden wall that both divides and connects them. The moment she rounds the corner in an imposing squared-off fur coat, the image shifts from an intimate, partial view to a fully embodied woman stepping into three-dimensional space. This visual transition mirrors the emotional arc of the entire film—characters begin as idealized fantasies and must learn to see each other as flawed, real people. The opening credits preceding this scene use pages of a book being turned by a female hand, a literary framing device that establishes romantic and narrative tone while suggesting that love stories exist on paper before becoming lived experience.
Table of Contents
- How the 1939 Opening Establishes Character Through Visual Framing
- The Symbolism and Spiritual Dimension in Love Affair’s Opening
- Cinematography and the Porthole Effect’s Revolutionary Impact
- Comparing the Two Opening Scenes: 1939 vs. 1994
- The Empire State Building Symbol and Its Lasting Influence
- The Book Pages Opening Credits Device
- Historical Context and the 1939 Film’s Industry Impact
How the 1939 Opening Establishes Character Through Visual Framing
The porthole sequence functions as more than a meet-cute; it serves as a visual thesis statement for how the film approaches romantic love. By introducing both characters through a circular window that creates a halo effect around their faces, McCarey visually suggests that we see only the illuminated, idealized portions of these people—not their full moral complexity. Michel appears as a charming face framed by light, his identity as a faithless playboy hidden by the porthole’s framing. Similarly, Terry’s face takes on an ethereal quality through the circular glass, obscuring her status as a financially dependent woman trapped in a transactional relationship with Ken Bradley.
The framing device also establishes a key limitation that defines the entire narrative: when you meet someone through a porthole, you cannot see their hands, their body language, or the full context of who they are. This physical constraint becomes the film’s emotional constraint—Michel and Terry fall in love with partial images of each other, idealized by circumstance and separated by barriers (literal and social). Only later, in scenes aboard ship and particularly in the Madeira chapel sequence, do they see each other’s full humanity. The porthole effect lingers throughout the film as a visual reminder that their initial attraction is built on incomplete information.
The Symbolism and Spiritual Dimension in Love Affair’s Opening
Leo McCarey, drawing on his Catholic faith, presents true love in *Love Affair* not as mere attraction but as something approaching the miraculous. The opening scene’s religious undertones become explicit when the ship docks in Madeira and Terry kneels before a Madonna statue in a chapel. Michel observes her in prayer and sees her in an entirely new spiritual light—no longer the woman being “kept” by another man, but a soul capable of grace and redemption. This spiritual reframing is not sentimental flourish; it’s central to why the Production Code Administration accepted the film’s ending. Terry, who begins as a morally compromised woman, must atone for her economic dependence and sexual availability through spiritual awakening before happiness is narratively permissible.
The opening scenes establish this spiritual dimension through careful visual choice. Rudolph Maté’s use of chiaroscuro lighting—particularly in those early ship scenes—emphasizes shadow and light in ways that suggest divine illumination rather than simple cinematography. The porthole framing, the book credits turning pages, even Terry’s first appearance in her fur coat—all carry visual weight suggesting that this isn’t a realistic romance but a parable. This approach carries a significant limitation: modern audiences accustomed to naturalistic dialogue and psychology may find the film’s spiritual codification heavy-handed or dated. The 1994 remake, by contrast, abandons this religious dimension entirely, replacing spiritual awakening with emotional trauma as the catalyst for genuine connection.
Cinematography and the Porthole Effect’s Revolutionary Impact
The porthole sequence represents a subtle but revolutionary approach to cinematography in 1939. By framing a character’s face within a circular window, Maté creates what feels like an intimate close-up while maintaining a wider compositional space. The wooden frame of the porthole itself becomes a compositional element—a border that emphasizes the separation between these two characters even as they see each other. When Irene Dunne’s face appears in the porthole and then she emerges in full frame, the cut is both startling and inevitable. She moves from being an abstraction (a beautiful face in a circle of light) to being a person with mass, texture, and agency.
This visual strategy influenced romantic cinema for decades following the film’s 1939 release. Filmmakers recognized that a character could be established through partial framing before appearing fully, creating a sense of discovery that mirrored emotional revelation. However, this technique carries a production constraint: it requires precise blocking, careful focus pulling, and exact actor positioning to create the illusion of seeing someone through a confined space. The 1939 *Love Affair* succeeded because both Boyer and Dunne understood portraiture—they knew how to present their faces to a camera, how to use their eyes and mouth in tight framing. Lesser actors would have made the porthole sequence feel awkward or contrived. The effect only works when executed with absolute precision.
Comparing the Two Opening Scenes: 1939 vs. 1994
The 1994 remake, written by Robert Towne and Warren Beatty, modernizes the opening by replacing the Atlantic Ocean liner with a commercial airplane flight. This shift from ship to aircraft isn’t merely a matter of updating transportation; it fundamentally changes the opening’s tone and mechanism. In the 1939 version, Michel and Terry meet during calm sailing conditions and fall in love through witty conversation and spiritual awakening. In the 1994 version, they meet when sports announcer Mike Gambril (Beatty) and singer Terry McKay (Annette Bening) are forced to evacuate the aircraft during a malfunctioning descent over Cook Island. The shared trauma of an emergency landing becomes the bonding catalyst rather than charm and spiritual compatibility.
This represents a significant philosophical difference in how the two films approach romantic connection. The 1939 *Love Affair* suggests that true love emerges from deep conversation, shared values, and spiritual awakening—the plane malfunction in the 1994 version serves as a shortcut to emotional intimacy, collapsing weeks of shipboard courtship into a single moment of existential crisis. The female characters have been renamed identically across both versions (Terry McKay), but the male character’s name changed from Michel Marnet to Mike Gambril, reflecting the shift from a Continental playboy archetype to an American sports celebrity. Both films preserve the central plot device—the couple agrees to meet in New York City three months later if their attraction endures—but the path to that agreement diverges entirely. The 1939 opening feels like the beginning of a love story; the 1994 opening feels like the middle of a disaster narrative that becomes a love story.
The Empire State Building Symbol and Its Lasting Influence
The porthole opening scene establishes a romantic journey that culminates at the Empire State Building, a symbol that permeates the entire film and has influenced romantic cinema ever since. The building functions as a beacon of human ambition, a testament to technological progress, and—most importantly—as a reconciliation site where separated lovers can prove their commitment. By positioning the Empire State Building as the destination where Michel and Terry will reunite, the film transforms a landmark building into an emotional touchstone. It becomes more than architecture; it becomes a promise made physical. This Empire State Building symbol proved so potent that it established a trope that subsequent romantic films emulated for decades.
When films needed a gesture that conveyed both grand ambition and romantic sincerity, they looked to *Love Affair*’s model. However, the symbol carries a built-in limitation: it’s specific to New York City and its particular skyline, making it difficult to universalize. The 1994 remake relocated the reconciliation site to the Empire State Building as well, preserving the symbol even while updating everything else. What works in the 1939 original as a distant, almost unreachable goal—a building you see from a ship approaching New York Harbor—becomes more problematic in the 1994 version, where characters live in a contemporary city where they could easily check into a hotel and meet wherever they want. The symbol loses narrative necessity when transportation and communication become frictionless.
The Book Pages Opening Credits Device
Before the porthole scene begins, *Love Affair* establishes its romantic tone through a credits sequence showing pages of a book being turned by a female hand. This literary framing device accomplishes several things simultaneously: it positions the film as a narrative experience rather than documentary realism, it feminizes the storytelling perspective (the hand belongs to a woman), and it suggests that romantic love exists in the realm of literature and imagination before it manifests in lived experience. The pages appear to be from a novel or poem, not a screenplay, reinforcing the idea that this is a story about romantic archetypes rather than contemporary realism.
This opening credit choice was unusual for 1939, when many Hollywood films preferred to establish immediacy and present-tense experience. By choosing literary framing, director Leo McCarey signals that audiences should approach *Love Affair* as a heightened, almost storybook version of romance rather than a slice-of-life drama. The book pages turning create a rhythm and pace that mirrors the film’s own narrative unfolding, with each page turn suggesting story progression. When the porthole scene begins immediately after these credits, the transition from literature to visual cinema feels natural rather than jarring—the book has become the film, and the film will become the lived experience of the characters.
Historical Context and the 1939 Film’s Industry Impact
The film’s opening scene reflected the Hollywood studio era at its height: precise cinematography, carefully designed sets, perfectly groomed stars, and production values that were staggering for the period. The porthole framing required custom-built set construction to create the exact circular window effect; no shortcuts were taken.
Cinematographer Rudolph Maté worked with lighting equipment and techniques that represented the cutting edge of 1939 technology. This level of craftsmanship in the opening scenes established the film as a prestige production, signaling to audiences that they were about to experience something made with exceptional care and artistic intention. The opening scene was not merely a scene but a statement about cinema itself—that the medium could transform a simple meeting between two people into something that felt mythic, spiritual, and enduring.
- Love Affair* arrived in 1939, a year that film historians consider “the greatest year in Hollywood history,” when studios were operating at peak productivity and American cinema reached unprecedented levels of technical and artistic sophistication. The film received six Academy Award nominations at the 12th Academy Awards ceremony in 1940, including a nomination for Best Picture. Director Leo McCarey was already an established filmmaker—he had won the Academy Award for Best Director in 1937 for *The Awful Truth*, another sophisticated comedy-drama about marriage and commitment. This pedigree meant that *Love Affair* arrived with considerable prestige and artistic credibility, not as a modest romance but as a major studio production with significant resources.
