The Other Love Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.0

The Other Love Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 30, 2014

Tear jerkers remain one of the most consistent genres in film, but it’s instructive to look at some of the most successful of these “three hankie weepers” to understand why they connect with audiences. While Love Story had a built in audience due to its long stay atop the bestseller lists before the film came out, the movie adaptation had one salient characteristic that other megahits exploiting the imminent demise of a major character tend to share: it made you care about the people on screen. Oliver and Jenny may not have been the most innovative characters to ever waltz into a movie, but original author Erich Segal’s screenplay, Arthur Hiller’s direction and the performances by Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw somehow managed to rise above the admittedly hackneyed premise to deliver an emotionally devastating accomplishment. On the flip side of this equation there’s the largely lamentable The Other Love, a film that posits a remarkably vigorous seeming Barbara Stanwyck as a terminally ill concert pianist who spends her dying days living it up with a continental playboy when really, truly she should be basking in the obvious affections of her concerned physician. The Other Love is a pretty turgid exercise from the get go, but it makes several fundamental structural errors that keep it from ever really connecting with the audience.

The first of several errors The Other Love makes is dropping the viewer into the story in media res. With no background or preparation, the film simply starts at a mountaintop sanitarium in Switzerland where famous concert pianist Karen Duncan has arrived because —well, here’s the second mistake The Other Love makes, for it hints around a diagnosis of tuberculosis without ever really explicitly getting into details. This may have been more obvious to forties’ audiences, back when this disease was much more prevalent than it is today, but it instantly makes the whole premise almost generic, without any real emotional pull. That, coupled with the fact that we know next to nothing about Karen other than that she’s a skilled pianist (as shown in the opening shot, part of the credits sequence).

Karen is put through her diagnostic paces by kindly Dr. Anthony Stanton (David Niven), and again the film seems to miss its emotional mark by positing a near instant attraction between the two characters. This is especially hard to swallow since Niven is strangely tamped down in the role, hardly the dashing gent his film persona typically tended to offer. Stanwyck’s Karen is also a bit rebellious (as befits Stanwyck’s typical film persona), and the two just seem to mix like oil and water. That at least sets up what turns out to be the kind of odd love triangle at the center of the film. When Karen takes a horse and carriage out for a little sightseeing ride one day, she almost collides with a race car driven by bon vivant Paul Clermont (Richard Conte), and throwing caution to the wind (since Stanton has warned her to relax and take things easy), Karen embarks on a whirlwind affair (or at least as much of one as could be shown in 1947) with Clermont.

There are a number of ill fitting attributes running rampant through this film, but the bottom line is none of the characters is anyone you really care about. This does change somewhat in the final third or so of the film, when Karen’s dire state of health becomes more of an issue, but even here there’s a lack of real connection to the predicament that makes everything ring hollow. There are also some unintentionally funny bits scattered throughout the film, including the fact that everyone—including the supposedly deathly ill tubercular patients—smoke like chimneys.

Director Andre de Toth is chiefly remembered, if he's remembered at all, for the 1953 horror outing House of Wax 3D, simply doesn't seem to know how to shape this material. The fact that this was based upon a short story by Erich Maria Remarque may provide one potential issue, namely the feeling that this tale has been padded to within an inch of its life. Ironically, some of Remarque's more fully developed novels suffered from an equal but opposite fate, as adapters attempted to slice and dice to achieve something manageable (see the recent Olive release of Arch of Triumph for a salient example).

That leaves some ostensibly “minor” elements to help generate some interest. Joan Lorring is great as one of the other patients at the sanitarium, and ironically it’s her arc that many viewers will probably find the most compelling. The film is also graced by an unusually florid score by Miklos Rozsa, here providing great piano cues that are supposedly played by Stanwyck (who actually does a credible job most of the time—though she has a tendency to just kind of flop her hands on the fake keys rather than actually press down on them). Rozsa provides a lot of his patented big, stirring melodies here, filtered through a kind of Rachmaninovian prism. But it’s all a lot of sound and fury largely signifying nothing, or at least nothing you’ll care very much about.

The Other Love Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Other Love is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. There is quite a bit of damage in the early going here, including pretty rampant telecine wobble through the credits, as well as more than the usual amount of scratches and other blemishes afflicting the image. Once things get officially underway, though, there's quite a bit of improvement, though it's inconsistent. When this transfer looks good (which it does most of the time), it offers a naturally filmic appearance, with very good contrast and nicely modulated gray scale. This may have been sourced from composite elements, though, for there are a number of issues with variable clarity and grain structure that at least hint at different sources. Cinematographer Victor Milner, who won an Oscar for the 1935 Cleopatra with Claudette Colbert, lights the film incredibly well, at times infusing it with an almost noir ambience (see screenshot 5). As with virtually all Olive catalog releases, there have been no restoration efforts, and similarly no undue digital tweaking of the image.

The Other Love Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

While there's nothing overly problematic with The Other Love's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix aside from a few errant pops and cracks, the track has a rather pronounced boxy sound that tends to detract from the lovely Rozsa score and make the piano music sound just a trifle brittle at times. Dialogue escapes largely unscathed, and is offered cleanly and clearly. Fidelity is very good within the context of the aforementioned, and there's nothing here that will unduly concern those with reasonable expectations.

The Other Love Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

As with most Olive Films catalog releases, this disc contains no supplemental features.

The Other Love Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There was a fantastically funny skit parodying Love Story on the late, lamented Carol Burnett Show where Carol, as the Jenny character, kept hacking her little tubercular cough like some kind of suburban Camille, while her distraught husband (the always brilliant Harvey Korman) tries to cope. The doctor has told Harvey that Carol only has a few seconds left to live, and Harvey, in trying to make his wife's last moments on Earth more pleasurable, asks her if she wants anything. "A 3 minute egg," is Carol's priceless response to Harvey's even more distraught reaction, one that brought down the house in gales of laughter. There's nothing quite that funny in The Other Love, but the film is such a maudlin mess that many cynics will indeed be tempted to laugh, if only to survive the treacly premise and lurching presentation.