Overshadowed all these years by the 1957 remake An Affair to Remember, also directed by Leo McCarey, Love Affair is every bit as much a film to remember-and every bit a McCarey film, as funny as it is tender. A classic among tales of thwarted love, its influence on all subsequent romantic melodramas has been obscured by virtue of its unavailability. The story will ring a bell: Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne, each engaged to another, vow to give their shipboard romance a six-month test of absence. The reunion, to be held atop the Empire State Building, is aborted by a conspiracy of chance and tragedy. In his book Love in Film, William K. Everson writes of "the deft way that Leo McCarey (with superb collaboration from his two stars) keeps it all bowling along merrily within the structure of a comedy, yet constantly pulls drama and pathos from thin air. Little gems of comedy...constantly act as punctuation and prevent the honest sentiment from ever becoming sticky-although there are one or two narrow escapes...(The film) is so firmly entrenched in the Hollywood tradition of the late thirties-resolutely turning its back on the Depression...that today it takes on an added socio-historical dimension as well."