“Falling in Love Again (1980): Steven Paul’s Bold Debut and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Early Break”

Falling in Love Again: A Short History

When Falling in Love Again arrived in 1980 it carried a quietly exotic pedigree: a lush Michel Legrand score, a cast led by Elliott Gould and Susannah York, and the curious byline of a wunderkind director-producer-screenwriter named Steven Paul — who was barely out of his teens when the picture was made. Paul, born in 1959, wrote, produced and directed the film as his feature debut at roughly 21 years old, a bold move that set the tone for a movie that felt as much like an earnest family project as it did an attempt at classical, sentimental romance.

What's The Movie About

The film tells the story of Harry and Sue Lewis, a married couple whose present-day cross-country drive to a New York high school reunion becomes a gateway to flashback nostalgia. Through Harry’s memories we’re carried back to the Bronx of the 1940s — the teenage romance, the tests of young adulthood, and the small moments that supposedly bind a marriage across decades. The structure is straightforward: present-day marital malaise framed by affectionate (if sometimes cloying) recollections of first love.

A Pre-Fame Michelle Pfeiffer

What keeps modern viewers curious is not so much the plot as the cast and the circumstances. Elliott Gould, by 1980 a well-known but occasionally eclipsed star, plays the wistful husband; Susannah York — who also took a co-writing credit on the screenplay — plays his wife. The film is also notable for featuring Michelle Pfeiffer in a small, early role as the younger version of York’s character, a casting footnote that now reads like a piece of pre-fame trivia. Cinematographers Dick Bush and Wolfgang Suschitzky lens the film, and the music — an often-sweeping presence — was composed by Michel Legrand, whose romantic orchestral flourishes shape the movie’s emotional texture.

A Director at Just 21 Years Old

Paul’s young age and the film’s old-fashioned sentimentality earned the production a bit of festival attention: contemporaneous photographs and festival coverage show Susannah York attending the 1980 Cannes Film Festival to present the picture, a signal that the film’s backers were aiming for prestige as well as commercial release. Still, a Cannes appearance did not translate into critical triumph. Major reviewers were unkind: Vincent Canby of The New York Times dismissed the movie’s screenplay as “witless,” and the film struggled to find an audience on release. Ultimately Falling in Love Again failed to make a significant box-office impact and settled into the long tail of late-20th-century romantic curiosities.

Why did Falling in Love Again Falter into Obscurity

Why did the film falter? Part of the answer lies in tone and perspective. The work of a filmmaker who conceived the idea as a teenager and then completed it in his early twenties, the movie mixes adolescent idealizing with adult melodrama in ways that many critics judged uneven. Modern retrospectives tend to call the film “nostalgic” and occasionally “overwrought,” praising certain performances (Pfeiffer’s youthful presence is often singled out) while faulting the script’s sentimentality and structural flabbiness. The lush Legrand score — which Gould later described as “very large” and perhaps a touch excessive — underlines the film’s tendency toward grand emotion over subtle stakes.

Steven Paul's Bright Future

In time, Falling in Love Again became less a living classic and more a footnote: an early credit in Michelle Pfeiffer’s rising résumé, a test of Elliott Gould’s range in smaller-scale romantic fare, and the debut of a filmmaker who would move into producing and commercial genre work in later decades. For Steven Paul the film was the beginning of a long, sometimes idiosyncratic career in independent production; for audiences it remains a period piece that wears its nostalgia — for the ‘40s and for movie-musical grandeur — on its sleeve.

Watching Falling in Love Again Today

If you watch Falling in Love Again today, expect a movie that wants to be remembered like an old home movie — expansive score, warm lighting, and a sentimental reverie of first love. It’s not a perfect picture, and contemporary critics were frank about its shortcomings; but it’s historically interesting as an artifact: a young director’s audacious feature debut, a Cannes-level showpiece for its lead, and a curious early glimpse of an actress (Michelle Pfeiffer) who would soon become a household name. For readers and fans of film history, the movie is worth seeing as an example of late-1970s/early-1980s independent romantic cinema and as a reminder that not every festival screening leads to lasting fame — sometimes it simply preserves a moment in the careers of those who made it.

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Falling in Love Again

1980 Movies

Michelle Pfeiffer

Elliott Gould

Susannah York

Steven Paul

Cannes Film Festival

Film History

1980s Cinema

Romantic Dramas