Falling in Love Again (1980)
A forthcoming high school reunion forces a middle-aged couple to confront their marital problems, thrown into sharp relief by the husband’s memories of their adolescent courting in wartime New York.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Content warning: Death.
Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film Falling in Love Again and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.
Falling in Love Again tells the story of a middle-aged couple, Harry (Elliott Gould) and Sue Lewis, née Wellington (Susannah York), who live in Los Angeles with their teenage children, Hilary (Bonnie Paul) and Donnie (Tony O’Dell). Harry and Sue’s marriage is strained: while she runs the department store they own together, he feels ineffectual, regretting his failed career aspiration to become an architect, and continually yearning for his own adolescence in wartime New York. The family are planning to drive back across the country for Harry to attend his school reunion.
The majority of the film intersperses the preparations for and the road trip itself with Harry’s flashbacks to life in the Bronx in 1944, narrated through his interior monologue. Seventeen-year-old Harry, then nicknamed ‘Pompadour’ (played in the flashback by Stuart Paul), lives with his Jewish American parents (Robert Hackman and Kaye Ballard) and spends most of his time loitering the neighbourhood with his friends Joey ‘The Idiot’ Kestenbaum (Anthony Casertano), Moishe ‘Meatloaf’ Leibowitz (Dan Davies), Stan ‘The Con’ Mecker (Steven Paul), and Frank ‘Como’ Cucelli (Martin Katzoff).
While visiting his father, a tailor, at work, Pompadour sees and becomes infatuated with the factory owner’s daughter, Sue Wellington (Michelle Pfeiffer). His friends contrive to introduce the two of them and the chemistry is evident, but her wealthy parents (Herbert Rudley and Marion McCargo) are set on her marrying her fiancé, the well-heeled and athletic Alan Childs (Todd Hepler), who is contemptuous of both Pompadour and Sue’s friendship with him. Pompadour meanwhile receives an education in seduction from Cheryl ‘The Queen of Tar Beach’ Herman (Cathy Tolbert), an attractive married woman whom he and the other neighbourhood boys persistently spy on and lust over.
Seeking to impress the civically and patriotically minded Sue, who volunteers in her own spare time as a nurse, Pompadour and his friends organise a huge neighbourhood scrap drive to support the war effort. The plan succeeds, and Sue chooses him over Alan. After Como enlists in the Army and is subsequently killed in action, Sue suggests she and Pompadour marry to prevent him being called up when he turns eighteen. However, the union is opposed by their parents because of their different social and ethnic backgrounds, as well as their youth.
Back in the present day, Harry struggles to change a tyre in a downpour, and becoming frustrated with Sue’s instructions, criticises her for being too controlling, to which she retorts by accusing him of being a dreamer. Harry storms off but recalls how their parents’ hostility had nearly driven them apart before, only for Sue to realise the effort he had gone to to woo her in the first instance, causing them to reconcile. The memory prompts Harry to return to Sue and the children and embarrassedly put the row behind them.
The family eventually arrive in New York, with Harry delighted to be back, reminiscing in their hotel room about his and Sue’s wedding, a happy neighbourhood occasion bankrolled through Stan the Con’s illicit enterprises. Yet back in the present, Harry’s and Sue’s efforts to make love that evening prove lacklustre. Harry decides to revisit his old neighbourhood, but is depressed by the extent of its physical decay and social change. He is propositioned by a sex worker and accompanies her, unknowingly being watched by Sue who has come to find him. When he returns to the hotel, she confronts him about the incident and the two argue again.
Harry attends his reunion without Sue, with all of his old friends and acquaintances there, save for the deceased Como, and Stan, who is in prison. At first Harry boasts about the extent of his and Sue’s continued romantic attachment, but then speaks increasingly honestly of her professional success and his own feelings of inadequacy. Meanwhile, Sue finds Harry’s latest architectural sketches, a passion she thought he had long since abandoned. Realising that he is still the man she fell in love with, she travels to the reunion and interrupts Harry’s confession. They embrace and leave together. The film ends with the two of them sitting outside discussing their plans for renovating the store.
Reunion and reminiscence
Harry’s flashbacks to the 1940s are heavily stylised. Framing devices such as black and white photos around the Lewis family home becoming colourised moving pictures, the exaggerated boyish goofiness of Pompadour and his friends, the usage of period music, and Harry’s voiceover, all serve to give these scenes a strongly dreamlike quality. Late adolescence is characterised as a separate social world, combining autonomy and self-organisation with the absence of real adult responsibility, though occasionally the gang play at the latter (with tragic consequences in the case of Como).
What is really notable here is that writer-director Steven Paul, who also played Stan the Con, was in his late teens and early twenties when he wrote and made the film, based on the memoirs of his father, Hank.1 He turned this initial treatment into a script with the help of the Jewish Canadian writer Ted Allan, and co-star Susannah York. The outcome of this intergenerational collaboration is a film that really does feel like a young man conjuring up a youth he has no direct recollection of, a romanticisation of the past that comes from bringing to life stories he had learned second-hand.
The reunion itself is the propulsive device within the plot. It gives purpose and narrative logic to Harry’s remembering, indulging his dwelling in the past but also offering the promise of its reconnection with the present, of those memories’ and Harry’s own relevance. It also compels Harry and Sue to, over the course of their journey together, face up to the problems in their marriage. The event, when it finally comes, is an anti-climax, in which Harry’s continuing childish braggadocio emphasises the disjuncture between whom he was and where his life now is, the self-delusion in his self-presentation. Harry departs from the reunion when he comes to terms with the part of the past that really matters in his present and future: his wife.
Gender and nostalgia
Harry is not only childish; he is emasculated, he is impotent. His nostalgia is an evasion of his unconvincing performance as an adult man: his irrelevance in his supposed working partnership with his wife; his emotional and sexual failings as a husband; his inconsistency as a male adult role model for his children. This very gendered failure is epitomised by his career trajectory: from aspiring architect, who dreamt of building things, remaking the world around him, to flailing department store co-owner, in the world of fashion and sales where his wife is in the ascendancy. There is a class element here too, a trajectory from production to consumption: Harry’s father once made clothes, and now Harry helps sell them.
Sue is a central actor within Harry’s flashbacks, even if we view her actions principally from his perspective. Yet Sue in the present, practical and oriented towards the here-and-now, has little appetite for sentimental reminiscences. She is mildly dismissive of Harry’s nostalgia, indulging him by travelling along with him to New York for the reunion, but also occasionally deflating his romanticising of his former friends (such as by commenting on Stan’s criminality) and reminding him that things might not be as he remembered them. There is little sense that she identifies as having been part of that milieu, integral to it as she is in Harry’s reminiscences; that she realises when he is dreaming about the past, he is also dreaming about their own adolescent romance.
The breakdown of Harry’s and Sue’s relationship is essentially a product of their being out of time with each other. He has chosen to mostly absent himself from the present, to dwell primarily in the past. She barely seems to remember at all, to reject it in exclusive favour of the rigours of the present, of work and parenting, and in losing sight of whom Harry was, also loses sight of whom he is now. It is only when she discovers his recent architectural drawings that she can reconnect Harry past and present, to remember the Harry of her adolescence and see that essence of him in her middle-aged husband, to recognise and embrace his dreaming about the future.
Time and geography
It is striking to compare Falling in Love Again with a later cycle of reunion films made in the 1990s, which I have previously written about here for the newsletter. These too centre primarily on reunions as opportunities for physical acts of return, although with a slightly different logic. Beautiful Girls (1996), Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997), and Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) all focus on young adults returning to the suburbs and small towns they grew up in from the more vibrant cities where they now live and work. Falling in Love Again is also about a journey across space as well as time, but with a very different logic to its geography.
The film counterposes two versions of America. One is the New York of the war years: a world of tightknit communities built around ethnic identities and densely populated neighbourhoods. The other is the Los Angeles of the 1970s: an affluent, physically sprawling, built around cars and nuclear families, in the state formerly governed by Ronald Reagan, who would end 1980 as President, and usher in the end of the New Deal order ascendant in those war years. Though the film is based around a road trip, specifically to allow for the build-up of tension between Harry and Sue within a confined space, but between those scenes and the flashbacks, we get scant if any sense of the America that exists between these two cities, heightening the contrast between them.
Nostalgia as a term originally referred to homesickness rather than a yearning for an earlier period.2 Harry’s desire is to go back in both time and space, and acts as if he believes doing the latter will mean the former as well. He bemoans the spread-out nature of LA as antithetical to community formation and lionises the Bronx of his youth, despite Sue’s warnings that it may no longer be as it was. Of course, the New York he does return to is that which during the 1970s came to be popularly associated with urban decay, racialised ideas around crime, and fiscal crisis – in many ways, a harbinger of the backlash against the New Deal order that Reagan rode into power.3 After his demoralising visit to his old neighbourhood, Harry’s dreaming about the past ends; he is left to face up to the state of his life and marriage in the here and now.
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The film was very much a family affair: Hank Paul was also credited as an executive producer; Steven Paul’s mother was associate producer and casting director; his brother Stuart played Pompadour; and his sister Bonnie played Hilary Lewis.
For the history of nostalgia as an (often pathologised) idea, see Agnes Arnold-Forster, Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion (London: Picador, 2024).
For a more in-depth examination of New York in this period, see Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (New York: Metropolitan, 2017).
Terrific essay -- thank you. I'm curious what the trailer you posted was a trailer for? Surely not the original theatrical release, since it says "...and Michelle Pfeiffer, in the role that began her triumphant career," and no one in 1980 would've known to say that yet. Was there a re-release at some point? A DVD release for which a trailer was released? Something else...?