Love Story

In director Arthur Hiller's surprise-hit weepie — based on Erich Segal's novella — Ryan O'Neal plays Oliver Barratt IV, a comfortably-off Harvard pre-law student who falls in love with Radcliffe music student Jenny Cavilleri (Ali MacGraw), a freewheeling, delightfully profane product of a blue-collar Italian/American family. Oliver's father (Ray Milland) heartily disapproves of the subsequent marriage and cuts off his son's allowance. Despite financial travails (the pampered Oliver actually has to go to work!), the couple is blissfully happy....until Jenny is diagnosed as having one a diseases that consigns the victim to an early death, but which leaves said victim looking like a million bucks even on the brink of Eternity. The movie's catchphrase "Love means never having to say you're sorry" became the stuff of parody as Love Story went on to gross more money than any Paramount production before it. This enormously successful film inspired an execrable sequel, Oliver's Story.

AMG Review: Some viewers dismiss Love Story as a cynical, manipulative tearjerker, mentioning "MacGraw's Disease," an incurable ailment which leaves its victims brave, sunny, and radiant. But these easy criticisms ignore why the film works so beautifully in the first place: it presents a pair of interesting, fully realized characters and makes us fall in love along with them. Ali MacGraw's portrayal of Jenny Cavilleri is so exuberant yet believable (she talks like a sailor) that she is immensely appealing, and Ryan O'Neal's Oliver is both sympathetic and admirable. These are good people, and when Jenny gets sick and Oliver grieves, we suffer along with them. Unlike with most tearjerkers and disease-of-the-week movies, we cry not because someone died, but because Jenny died. For proof of how much she's missed, see the dreadful sequel, Oliver's Story.