When Harry met Sally concludes with Harry running to tell Sally about her annoying sandwich-ordering habits. Before plowing down zombies on the Walking Dead, Andrew Lincoln attempted to cuckold his newly wedded best friend with cue cards and boom box Christmas carolers in Love Actually.
Apparently this tripe is what passes for romance. What happened to cinema? 70 years ago, romance was Rick telling Ilsa to get out of his dreams and onto a plane, literally minutes before killing someone. Things have gone downhill since Casablanca. The following are some of the more charmingly romantic moments in cinema that don’t resort to sweet nothing’s and smooches….
10. Dracula (1931)
In 1922, legendary German filmmaker F.W. Murnau made Nosferatu, the longest surviving vampire film that was not-so-loosely based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Outraged at this copyright infringement, Stoker nearly succeeded in ridding the world of every surviving copy of the film. Luckily, copies of Murnau’s horror movie still exist.
A decade later, the rights to Stoker’s novel were legally obtained and Dracula was made into a feature film by Freaks directed Tod Browning. Starring a pre-Plan 9 Bela Lugosi, Dracula follows a caped weirdo with an Eastern European accent as he befriends a wealthy family while out at the theater. After feasting on the family friend Lucy, Dracula sticks around to stalk the young daughter Mina.
Infatuated with her, Dracula breaks into Mina’s room at night and sucks blood from her neck. He later attacks her outside of her house and subsequently combines his blood with hers, making her his possession as she slowly morphs into a vampire. It sounds violent and misogynist, but it’s really no different than Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
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2 Comments
I’m a little surprised King Kong isn’t on your list, and specifically Ann Darrow’s romantic attachment to a masochistic giant monkey. Maybe it was a case of severe Stockholm Syndrome, after all the was a captive offered as a ritual sacrifice but she actually looked like she wanted to stay with Kong instead of being rescued by Adrian Brody et al.
Then after all that, the two go ice-skating in Central Park and he climbs the Empire State Building just for the two of them to get a moments piece to watch the sunrise together. Kong’s viciousness on top of the building when the planes arrives is probably a frustration at the noise interupting his romantic moment.
true romance a non-romantic film? seriously? it is definitely on my romantic movie list. i love that film!