Best Love Stories

With Valentine's Day approaching, you may be in the mood to rent good love story and curl up on the couch with your Valentine sweetie. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Out of Africa [1985, director Sydney Pollack] is the story of real-life author Baroness Karen Blixen, who wrote under the name of Isak Dinesen. Meryl Streep plays Blixen, who, after marrying for convenience, moves to Kenya and runs a coffee plantation. There she meets and falls in love with the hunter-adventurer Denys Finch Hatton, played by Robert Redford. The beautiful cinematography contributes a great deal to this movie -- Blixen was as much in love with Africa as she was with Denys -- but the story is ultimately about the challenging love affair of these two people, and Blixen's ultimate heartbreak.

2. The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex [1939, director Michael Curtiz]. Bette Davis is an aging and neurotic Queen Elizabeth I in this film and Errol Flynn plays the dashing young Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex. Their love-hate relationship is complicated by political intrigues, court jealousies, and their personal limitations, and leads to its final tragic conclusion. I have to admit, this movie always makes me cry.

3. Not all love stories are sad ones, though, and Persuasion [1995, director Roger Mitchell] is just delightful. If you like Jane Austin stories (such as Pride and Prejudice,Emma, and Sense and Sensibility), you'll love Persuasion. Anne Elliot had, eight years previously, rejected the proposal of a young naval office, on the bad advice of her family, who believed he had no financial prospects. There have been no better prospects in the meantime, and now Captain Wentworth is back, now with rank and money. What will happen now, I wonder?