Love Affair (1932)
** (out of 4)
Predictable and rather boring love story about a rich social girl (Dorothy Mackaill) and a hard working man (Humphrey Bogart) who hopes to build airplane engines. The two of them start up an affair but he slowly begins to lose sight of his dream while falling in love with her. She also has other things on her plate including a rich man (Hale Hamilton) who has his own plans for her. I was really looking forward to this small drama mainly because it was the first major role for the young Bogart. I must admit that I found a little entertainment in watching him play the clean-cut good guy but the screenplay is so predictable that one will quickly lose interest in the film. To make matters worse, the films runs a brief 68-minutes but it feels double that. The screenplay really doesn't do a thing right as it's never really romantic, it features no laughs and in the end it seems as if you've really not even watched anything at all. I'm really not sure what the purpose of the movie was as the screenplay is so confused in what it wants to say that we never really know if we should care about Mackaill's character or if we should see her as some sort of villain. Even worse is the ending that really comes out of nowhere and amounts to nothing more than silly melodrama. What keeps the film watchable is Bogart who actually manages to turn in a nice performance even if it is a tad bit strange seeing him act without that Bogart persona, voice and attitude that we'd see even in his smaller Warner roles. Bogart plays the happy-go-lucky role pretty well and he doesn't seem to have a problem with the smiling and charming. I must admit that he has one of the strangest ways of standing around (with his arms behind his back) but this too is rather funny. Mackaill isn't bad in the film but she's not all that good either. I think she has a little charm but the role of the rich spoiled girl has been played so much better by so many people. It does seem she has a rather bad timing as there's one scene where it appears she accidentally hits Bogart in the face (the driving sequence) and then another where she walks straight into a chair (when their going to get her a cup of coffee). In the end, this isn't a horrible movie but it's not a good one either and without Bogart it would have been totally forgettable. I think even Bogart fans will find themselves bored so this is certainly only recommended to those who want to see everything he's done.
