Love Story (1970)

This film marked a before and after in the romantic genre and became a cult film, thanks to its success.

It is more than just a love story, it is the daily experiences of a couple trying to survive and better themselves without leaving aside studying and achieving a career that will lead to a successful future.

It had a double success in the same year, since the writer of the script, Erich Segal, while waiting for it to be staged, transformed it into a novel and launched it on February 14, 1970, Valentine's Day, achieving immediate sales and the acceptance of the readers that made it the best-selling work of the decade and translated into more than 20 languages, as well as being the assistant a few months later to the film version.

The film was directed by Arthur Hiller and the music was composed by Francis Lai, who also obtained a resounding success with it, winning the Oscar for best soundtrack and the Golden Globes.

The beginning of the plot takes place at the University where Oliver Barret IV, played by Ryan O Neal, meets Jennifer Cavilleri, (Ali MacGraw) who works in the library and studies music and they start a romance with no future, since he is a student and athlete from a millionaire family and she is not.

Overcoming all the obstacles, love triumphs and they end up getting married without taking into account the father's refusal, with whom Oliver does not have a good relationship, and face the future together as two ordinary people without economic resources.

They both work and study and in the end she ends up paying for his career. He graduates as a lawyer and manages to get an important job that ends up making them move from Cambridge, where they lived in the upper part of a house that was located in the law school, to New York.

When everything seemed to be on a happy path, everything gets complicated and a deadly and incurable disease makes its appearance, ending her life.

The film cost a mere $2.2 million to produce and grossed over $136 million, and contrary to the norm, critics considered it better than the book.

It had a sequel called Oliver Story, written and also released as a book by the same writer, which was unsuccessful, although it later served as the basis for the Korean TV series "Love Rain".

Love Story marked a whole decade and had countless imitations, parodies and homages in other films, it has withstood time and new technologies for having situations that can occur in any era of time,

Two curious things are that the protagonist is credited with raising a baby named Jennifer in North America in 1970 and that the film's theme song was played during the funeral procession of Iranian leader Qasem Soleimani.

I invite you to watch it and you will be as captivated by the story as millions have been for more than half a century.