A LOVE STORY gone sour

That she was ugly!

“That she was beautiful and brilliant?”

No,that she was ugly!

You won’t hear those reactions to the infamous opening narration of Love Story. But later this month,when Harvard undergraduates present the movie in a cherished annual ritual,they’ll be chanting those lines — and plenty of others just as barbed.

It’s been 40 years since Love Story was released. In that time,millions have wept over the star-crossed romance of the rich Harvard jock Oliver Barrett IV (Ryan O’Neal) and the poor Radcliffe bohemian Jennifer Cavalleri (Ali MacGraw),who succumbs to an unnamed disease in one of the most beautiful demises in cinematic history. The death in January of Erich Segal,the Harvard-educated classicist who wrote both the screenplay and the original best-selling novel,has tinged his brainchild’s ruby anniversary with particular poignance.

But even as fans celebrate the current Love Story milestone,many others deride the film,released at the height of Vietnam and the counterculture,as maudlin,old-fashioned and just plain schlocky. The film critic Judith Crist called it “utterly loathsome.” (What she wrote at the time can’t be repeated in a family newspaper.)

Nowhere is Love Story more pummeled than at Harvard,the site of Oliver and Jenny’s courtship. Every year the Crimson Key Society,a student organisation runs Love Story strictly for laughs for first-year students. “We’re looking to entertain the freshmen and help them feel comfortable in this new place,” said Maya Simon of the Crimson Key Alumni Association. That involves Crimson Key’s nearly 100 members sitting in the auditorium,jeering the proceedings. Just before MacGraw utters the deathless catchphrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Crimson Key members loudly implore her,“Don’t say it!” At the conclusion,when O’Neal repeats her pathetic utterance,they shout,“Plagiarist!” And so it goes. At one point,Oliver enters Jenny’s dorm,learns from a receptionist that she is in the “downstairs phone booth,” and asks,“Where is that?”

“Downstairs,stupid!”

“Everybody’s fair game,” said Alix Olian of Crimson Key. “If you’re in the movie,you get made fun of.”

Over the years,though,the rite has become so institutionalised that Crimson Key students now rehearse their routine before opening night. They engage in various bits of non-verbal business,including distributing tissues when Jenny is on her deathbed.

Crimson Key regards its presentation as a bonding experience. “Most people have a soft spot for Love Story,” said Eeke de Milliano,the group’s president. “The freshmen are,I think,secretly proud to see their university on the screen.”

The event is not entirely derisive. At various points,Crimson Key uses a laser pointer to spotlight campus landmarks and the fleeting appearance of Tommy Lee Jones (class of ’69),usually generating cheers and applause. “It was an aspect of the complicated relationship that people have with the Harvard mystique — you want to embrace it,but not too seriously,” said Kermit Roosevelt,class of 1993,”You want to be ironic about it.”

Brian Malone,class of 1996,now a graduate student in literature at the University of California,Santa Cruz,said he remembered the screening as “the highlight of freshman week.The experience instilled in me a certain condescension toward middlebrow taste.”

Not all Harvard alumni appreciate that attitude. The playwright Jenny Lyn Bader,who had her Love Story trial by fire in the 1980s,found it ‘fun and hilarious’ at the time. Later,her view changed. “I think it sent a disturbing message,” she said. “There was a feeling that one needed to make fun of Harvard,and be dismissive of human emotion,and that we should establish that during Week 1. It was mean-spirited.”

The single biggest source of jokes is undoubtedly MacGraw’s alter ego,Jenny Cavalleri. “She’s quite mean,and we just latch onto that,” said Peter Giordano,who helped organise the screening in 2003. MacGraw has long been aware of Crimson Key’s snarkiness but considers it very entertaining.

“Of course they are going to pick on Jenny — or is it on the actress playing her?” the 72-year-old actress asked in an e-mail. “I have had decades in which to wonder how on earth I managed to say ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’ without once asking our wonderful director,Arthur Hiller,what exactly it meant.”