Love in the Afternoon

A degree of sweetness and innocence is maintained despite some remarkably lewd jokes.

The production holds enchantment and delight in substantial quantity.

As Andrew Sarris says, not without its cruelties, but not without its beauties as well.

It’s not Gary Cooper’s fault that Billy Wilder wanted Cary Grant here so very badly, and that icon’s connotations are hard to shake in how the character has been conceived. But neither does Cooper seem particularly comfortable with what he brings to it.