Cinema Aphrodiso

Whether judged by hankies used, sighs heaved, or pulses quickened, a truly fine romantic movie can burn its way into generations of hearts. From the star-crossed (Casablanca, Roman Holiday, Brokeback Mountain) to the triumphant (It Happened One Night, Say Anything . . . , Working Girl), Laura Jacobs falls for the 25 greatest love stories the movies ever told.Any list of the most romantic movies—this one narrowed to movies in the English language—is going to draw sighs and harrumphs over beloved films left off. Quite a few unforgettable love stories are in movies that don’t comfortably fit the category (Gone with the Wind, for instance), and the contemporary rom-com, while classifiably romantic, can seem as slight as the dandelion—a sunny flowering, a puffball dispersed on a breeze.

Movies that reach the romantic pantheon often have more at stake than a trip to the altar and don’t always end up happily. Some invoke the archetypes of myth and fairy tale, diving into the deeper imaginative realms of high Romanticism, a movement enamored of mystery and nature untamed. Others are modeled on the literary “romance,” a centuries-old genre of narrative fiction that combines adventure, idealism, and courtly love, as exemplified by King Arthur and his Round Table. These tales frequently take place on a journey where desire is set against duty, and where love alters destiny. The mortal dislocations of World War II—our “Good War”—are formidably represented in the realm of the romantic. Casablanca, for example, sees patriotism prevailing over the love of one person. The English Patient sees the reverse.At the same time, high-flying ideals can become straitjackets or self-sabotage. Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious keys into a dark vein of lyricism, a place where self-sacrifice becomes voluptuous and ill. One thinks of William Blake’s iconic line, which sounds the bass note of Romantic poetry, “O Rose thou art sick.”