From Some Like It Hot and Howard Hawks' Scarface through to Sleepless in Seattle and the My Bloody Valentine 3D remake, February 14 has often a been plot device in Hollywood movies.
My highly unscientific survey suggests that for almost every Valentine's Day-themed movie which celebrates love and romance, there's another that takes a very dark or grisly look at that day.
Curiously given the highly commercialized nature of the occasion, the Hollywood studios have been slow to cash in by releasing romantic movies around that date. Last year Warner Bros. launched New Line's He's Just Not That Into You, a smart move which paid off as it sold $US94 million worth of tickets in the US and $85 million internationally. In 2008, Universal wasn't as fortunate with Definitely, Maybe, which rang up $55 million worldwide.
This week Warners looks to have a winner on its hands with Valentine's Day, a comedy directed by Garry Marshall with such an all-star cast, one wonders how many egos could be squeezed into the one film. There are 16 rolled-gold stars: Jamie Foxx, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Shirley MacLaine, Ashton Kutcher, Kathy Bates, Topher Grace, Patrick Dempsey, George Lopez, Queen Latifah, Emma Roberts and Taylor Lautner. The plot follows a diverse group of Los Angelenos as they navigate their way through romance and heartbreak during Valentine's Day.
There's already talk of a sequel as screenwriter Katherine Fugate has penned the first draft of a follow-up entitled New Year's Eve.
The earliest film I could find which dealt with the event is Consuming Love; or St. Valentine's Day in Greenaway Land, a short produced in 1911 starring Dolores Costello, who was known as The Goddess of the Silent Screen.
The infamous St.Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago was first depicted in Howard Hawks' Scarface in 1932, and it featured Paul Muni as Scarface Tony Camonte, Ann Dvorak as his sister Celeste, Osgood Perkins as his boss Lovo, and Karen Morley as Lovo's lover Poppy.
In the classic 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon were musicians who dress in drag after witnessing the massacre. The garage shooting in the opening scene of Dick Tracy was inspired by Al Capone's gunmen slaughtering a group of rival hoods in a garage in that bloody Chicago killing spree.
Roger Corman offered his take on that notorious event in his 1971 drama The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, with Jason Robards as Capone, a film dismissed by Roger Ebert as having “the suspense level of a police line-up.”
My Bloody Valentine 3D followed the survivors of a Valentine's Day massacre in a small mining town. Ten years later, bodies start appearing all over town, their hearts packed into blood-red candy boxes. A remake of George Mihalka's 1981 Canadian slasher, the movie grossed nearly $100 million worldwide, a decent return on its $15 million budget.
In Sleepless in Seattle, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan arrange to meet at the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day, just as Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr did in An Affair to Remember.
The narrative in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind starts on February 14 and among the witty lines in Charlie Kaufman's screenplay is this: “Valentine's Day is a holiday created by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.”
Actually when the Roman Catholic Church first declared February 14 as St. Valentine's feast day in 498 A.D., it wasn't celebrating romance: the aim was to curtail sexual passion. Valentine was a Christian priest martyred in the third century. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that people began to regard Valentine as the patron saint of romance.
For non-romantics, in 2008 Rotten Tomatoes compiled an “Anti-Valentine's Day List” of 14 films that it figured would make some people think twice about falling in love, or decide to stay single. Among the criteria, each movie had to feature at least one character who believes he or she is in love, and the relationship had to end badly for someone.
The list included The War of the Roses (“The Roses may start out as a happy couple, but that love turns to hate, and they both show some impressive levels of vindictiveness”), Fatal Attraction, Chuck & Buck, To Die For, In the Company of Men, Carnal Knowledge and Far From Heaven.
Last year Nia Vardalos made her contribution to that genre with I Hate Valentine's Day, in which she played a Brooklyn flower shop owner who terminates each budding relationship after five dates so she won't get hurt.
