I could sense it when I walked down the candy aisle in my local grocery store. Those special St. Valentine’s Day red and pink M and M’s are on the shelves! I resisted buying them (because I’m still clinging to my New Year’s resolution). But those candies started me thinking of all my favorite romance movies.

I’m not going to list them all. There are way too many, but when I’m surfing channels on my TV, there are a select few I have to sit down and watch until the end.

I fell in love with “Moonstruck” the first time I saw it, and nothing has changed my mind. I’m half Italian–so that could come into play. But I also think that love–when it comes–”strikes” us, and it has very little to do with logic and usually nothing to do with what we think we want. Romeo and Juliet might have lived to a ripe old age if Romeo hadn’t crashed the party the Capulets were throwing that night. (I particularly like the love story of Cher’s parents that’s threaded in. And what’s not to like about the performances by Cher and Nicholas Cage?)

I’m also a fan of “The American President.” When it first came out, I paid to see that movie more than once because I enjoyed taking my sister and then my nieces to see it. It has the classic romance plot structure: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and boy gets girl back. Plus, it has great performances by Annette Benning, Michael J. Fox and Martin Sheen. Once again, love is a surprise and not a very convenient one.

I love, love love “Myrphy’s Romance.” If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it–James Garner and Sally Field in a May-December love story. (All men should look as good as James Garner does at sixty!) This is a movie that I insisted my parents rent, and I watched it with them. So my perception could be tainted by the fact that both of them really enjoyed it–especially my mother. Once again, love comes as a surprise–but this time it’s the heroine who’s truly shocked by it. And my favorite scene is when she realizes that she’s fallen in love for the first time.

If you ask my three sons what my favorite movie is, they will say (stifling a groan–or not) that it’s Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest.” (That’s because when they were growing up, they had to watch it with me several times each. I wouldn’t allow them to change the channel. Mom’s rules!) It’s not a classic love story. It’s classic Hitchcock, and the sexual tension is to die for. Hitchcock was a master at creating it.

Those are the romance movies that the candy aisle started me thinking about. Do you have any special favorites? I’d love to hear about them.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 6:00 am and is filed under Cara Summers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.