Love Story – 1944 | 113 mins | Drama, Romance | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Margaret Lockwood stars with Stewart Granger in this romantic Gainsborough tear-jerker of doomed love set in wartime London and Cornwall. Directed by Leslie Arliss, this syrupy tribute to stiff-upper-lipped British pluck against all odds was critically derided but a considerable UK box-office success. It certainly belongs to a more innocent age, but that is key to its quaint, escapist charm.

After failing a routine medical whilst trying to enlist into the RAF, famous concert pianist Lissa (Margaret Loctkwood) discovers she has only a few months to live so travels to Cornwall for the final fling of her life. While there she falls in love with a former RAF pilot now mineral prospecting, Kit (Stewart Granger), a man embittered towards life and beset by an unnatural cynicism.

However, the course of true love never runs smooth and after unearthing Kit’s dark secret, that he is going blind, and that his relentlessly jealous childhood friend Judy (Patricia Roc) also secretly loves him. Lissa discovers through Judy that she has talked Kit into turning down a dangerous operation to restore his sight that has little chance of success. Lissa declares that she will depart and never see Kit again if Judy allows him to undergo the operation. He has the surgery and it succeeds, so Lissa leaves Cornwall and embarks on a long and arduous concert tour. On hearing her Albert Hall performance of ‘Cornish Rhapsody’ on the radio, and after seeing Kit’s reaction, Judy finally realises that it is Lissa he loves.