The story involves the cross-class romance of the photographer (Claudette Colbert) and a laborer (Fred MacMurray), and it takes seriously the question of their cultural clash.
This anachronism seems intended to nudge the viewer away from passive consumption of a high-class romance and toward a consideration of the systems underlying these lives.
Judging by the cover illustration and the title in embossed gold letters, it was the kind of historical novel Greta wouldn't dream of reading: a gritty, working-class romance, all arrogant mill owners and salt-of-the-earth girls in shawls and clogs.
We make Nancy Meyers movies.' " As part of the audience for whom these "sweet little middle-class romances" are intended, I must say I find this assessment, whatever its kernel of truth, a bit harsh.
"Clearly there is an audience for sweet little middle-class romances of the kind she makes, and it pleases the studios to indulge a woman, whom they would not trust with more vigorous projects.
Almost none of this disturbing material has made its way into "Life Class," where romance ultimately outweighs both the claims of art and the horrors of war.
The name of witchcraft is pregnant with fearful, yet delightful associations to that large class of romance readers, who, like the unhappy Orra, take pleasure in feeling "the chilled blood shoot cold through every vein".
And the faunlike Mr. Westwick from "Gossip Girl" gives Jonny a wistful good cheer that almost makes his class-crossing romance with Kim believable.
Walsh, a native New Yorker, brings an insider's stash of city-street wiles to the working-class, waterfront romance of Spencer Tracy's wise-cracking cop and Joan Bennett's hard-boiled waitress.
It is set in midcentury England in a gritty, cramped apartment where a volatile romance, class resentment and hot metal clash.
It runs against the genre, resisting a conservative tradition: set in Liverpool, championing an old-style working class, without a romance at its centre.
