Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-Review by Professor Popinjay

Yes, I’ve done a Non-review for Lover Come Back and yes, I mentioned Down with Love in that article. Now I’m writing an official comparison between the two. It’s a completely different article. I’m allowed to plagiarize myself. Okay, full disclosure, I didn’t recall writing a Lover Come Back Non-Review until I finished writing this article but I’ll be darned if I delete it after all this work. Plus it has some decent new jokes so what the hey.

Doris Day’s film “Lover Come Back” has been remade a few times under drastically different titles. The titles were so different primarily because these remakes were filmed in different languages.

I’ve never read anything that officially proclaimed Down with Love (2003, Renée Zellweger & Ewan McGregor) as a remake of Lover Come Back (1961, Doris Day & Rock Hudson) but the plots are very similar.

In both films you have two powerful buisiness persons who are competing for the same client. They are aware of each other by name but they’ve never actually met. The characters are polar opposites both in gender and business ethics and despise each other. As a means to get ahead of the game and distract the other, the male business person masquerades as a folksy naïve country boy and attempts to woo the female business person. It’s almost the same plot in both films.

Down with Love has patterned itself after all the tropes of a campy Doris Day farce. I wouldn’t call it a parody. More like an homage. It’s reverent to the genre and replicates it perfectly while modernizing the multitude of innuendos. In fact, if you go into Down with Love, don’t expect a cute innocent little love story between cute and innocent characters. Granted, it’s all under spoken and indirect but anyone who’s been around the block is going to know EXACTLY what’s really being hinted at. You’re great Grandma is going to know. So don’t go watching Down with Love with your friends when Great Grandma is in the room. Depending on her type she’ll either light the tv on fire to purify it through immolation or she’ll wink and blow kisses at one of your friends. Either way it will be a harrowing experience… especially if your friend reciprocates.

Lover Come Back is not all googly-eyes and hand-holding either though. There’s plenty of innuendo in certain Doris day films including LCB. It might just be a little more subtle is all but they’re there!

SPOILER AHEAD FOR LOVER COME BACK

The innuendo is there to a certain degree. And this is where the two films start to differ. In Lover Come Back the two characters do end up in bed together but Dorris Day demanded the film indicate that they got married first. This results in a bit of a mess of an ending where within the expanse of like five minutes they get an annulment, jump cut to 9 months later when she is having his baby and they get married again frantically. It’s a bit jerky and kind of anti-climactic. It feels tacked on just so they can have this funny one-night-stand scene but remain within the realm of morality. Personally, I would have been fine with the two characters not ending up together. He was kind of a manipulative sleaze ball.

My speculation on a better ending:

Maybe instead of ending up together, he could allude early on in the film that to woo her, he could act like his folksy naïve twin brother who wasn’t cut-out for fast-paced city life and stayed back on the farm. THEN, at the end of the film, after Doris realizes she’s been had by this charlatan who oozed charm and innocence, she happens to actually MEET the aforementioned brother. They (gnomes) could make a whole ‘nother movie out of a situation like that. Like maybe she avoids the twin like the plague because she doesn’t believe it’s the twin brother and she doesn’t find out he had a folksy twin until the end of the sequel! That would be hilarious. But no, we get a mess of an ending to what was a decent journey.

Down with Love on the other hand doesn’t muck about with all this silliness. I won’t spoil it but it’s pretty great and even manages to be empowering to the female lead to a degree. Although, I still don’t know why anyone would be interested in a manipulative playboy. The whole affair seems a bit shallow from both sides. Oh well, funny movie the both of them. At least DWL ends with Ewan McGregor singing so, you know, it literally ends on a high note.