Which 1939 romance was later remade by its director as An Affair to Remember? The film was Love Affair.
Love Affair is a 1939 romance directed by Leo McCarey and starring Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne. Its story brings together Michel Marnet, a French playboy, and Terry McKay, an American former nightclub singer, during an ocean-liner voyage. Both are engaged to other people, so their growing attachment creates the film’s central moral and emotional conflict.
McCarey developed the premise after a cruise, imagining two travelers who fall in love while obligated to someone else. The screenplay was written by Delmer Daves and Donald Ogden Stewart, with McCarey and Mildred Cram credited for the story. Production was complicated by censorship concerns about adultery.
McCarey remade the film in 1957 as An Affair to Remember, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. The later version follows the original closely but became more famous in popular culture, especially through its Empire State Building rendezvous and its influence on Sleepless in Seattle. A further 1994 remake returned to the title Love Affair.