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Movies To Hit The Love Spot

If you and your Valentine don't want to go out on the town this Valentine's Day, you might prefer a nice cozy evening at home with a romantic movie. So The Saturday Early Show invited two experts to offer recommendations: David Edelstein, a contributor for CBS Sunday Morning and movie critic for New York Magazine, and Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum.

Schwarzbaum's top pick is "Brief Encounter" (1945), about which she says, "Very sexy. Two married people who do not consummate their affair. Nothing gets more glamorous.

On a cafe at a railway station, housewife Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard). Although they are already married, they gradually fall in love with each other. They continue to meet every Thursday on the small cafe, although they know that their love is impossible.

"It is a masterpiece of 'holding back,' and I think since this was made during World War II, it was all about sacrifice and keeping things together," she continues. "And it's brimming with the unexpressed and un-acted-upon. My favorite kind of movie."

Edelstein chimes in, "Unconsummated love is the best kind. I gravitate more to where the characters go past the infatuation, past hating each other and then fall back in love.

"That's why," he says, "my favorite of all time is 'The Lady Eve' (1941), where Henry Fonda learns that Barbara Stanwyck is a skank, but she tricks him and he falls in love again. You learn that they are never as great as you think but not as bad as you think, either. We're all just human."

Another favorite is "Truly, Madly, Deeply" (1991), in which Juliet Stevenson is so in love with Alan Rickman that he comes back, and Schwarzbaum says "she does one of the greatest crying scenes of all time."

She adds, "I love the fact that Alan and his ghost friends sit around watching 'Brief Encounter' on television. Perfect connection."

In the movie, Stevenson moves on to find another mortal man. And it's a great Valentine's movie because it's about moving through grief.

Another critics' favorite is "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940), which was adapted into the Broadway musical "She Loves Me" and re-made both as the Van Johnson-Judy Garland movie "In the Good Old Summertime" (1949) and as the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan romantic comedy "You've Got Mail." It's about two people who work together and hate each other, but they have a secret life as anonymous pen pals. So the lesson is that surface is one thing, and the soul is another.

In "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey have surgery to have each other removed from their minds. Yet, Edelstein picks it was one of his favorite romantic movies.

His point is: Even with surgery, they can't stop thinking about each other.

"So here's my motto," he says, "Fall in and out of love with the same person through life."

One classic movie about which everyone seems to agree: "Casablanca" (1942).

"You just need to say that word and you can quote all the beautiful lines and see all the beautiful angles of Ingrid Bergman's chin. You can watch it every year."

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