Love Story was on one of those dozens of movie channels you get with many cable systems; I think it was actually called Love-East, or something. I had nothing to do, it was nominated for Best Picture, and I figured I should get it out of the way. Maybe I could pay some bills with it on in the background. I went into it blustering and irritated that a tear-jerker could fool people into nominating it for so many Oscars. I ended up crying like a baby. Sure, it's a shamelessly manipulative film. But it works, because it creates believable, likeable people, and you cry when terrible things happen to people you like.

It's your typical rich boy/poor girl summer romance that turns into much more. Oliver Barrett (Ryan O'Neal) is a Harvard jock whose ancestor's name adorns one of the halls. Jennifer Cavelli (Ali MacGraw) is the daughter of a poor baker who is there on scholarship. They start dating, as something of a lark. He has a bad relationship with his father, and dating a girl from the wrong side of the tracks is a good poke in the ribs. She likes the idea of dating the captain of the football team (hockey, actually). They fall in love, though, which forces them to ante up. He wants to marry her, while she thinks it's his ultimate "piss off" to his father. I think she was right at first, but he ends up doing it for all the right reasons. They marry, they struggle after Oliver disowns his family, and they end up happy. Then she is diagnosed with leukemia.

The film is somewhat leadenly directed. That annoying love theme that won an Oscar and pours out of millions of music boxes worldwide is virtually wall to wall in the film. It does jerk your emotions around somewhat cynically. But it works. I don't cry often at movies, and I will have to rent some action movies back to reassert my masculinity (kidding), but this one pulled all the right strings. Love means never having to say you're sorry, and I'm not sorry for enjoying this hokum.

The film was nominated for seven Oscars: Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Director, and Score. Only the score won. Erich Segal, the purveyor of what sounds like some of the most treacly sentimentalism on paper, actually wrote the famous novel after his screenplay was purchased. I have heard that the movie is much better than the novel, or just about anything Segal has produced since. The film was apparently Tommy Lee Jones's first role; he plays one of O'Neal's roommates. I was really shocked when the credits rolled (I missed the opening credits) and saw that the gaunt old man who played O'Neal's stoic father was the great Ray Milland, bad guy in dozens of movies from the 1940s and 1950s. O'Neal and MacGraw are both wonderful; it is a testament to director Hiller's skill that neither of the two of them have been as good in anything else I have seen, despite other flaws with his direction here.