Professor Thomas Leith directs UD's Film Studies program. He is well versed in Hollywood movies and popular culture. He is available for interview to discuss the best movies to share with your valentine. The top ten are outlined below and can be used freely.

Ten movies to share with your valentine

It Happened One Night. Claudette Colbert is the runaway heiress, Clark Gable the Depression-era reporter who starts out aiming for her story and ends up aiming for her. Frank Capra provides an object lesson in how to make a movie tingle with romantic tension without giving the stars a single kiss.

Now, Voyager. Dowdy Bette Davis gets a complete overhaul that includes an impossible relationship with married-with-daughter Paul Henreid, who lights two cigarettes and hands her one. Don’t ask for the moon; they’ve got the stars.

Notorious. It may not sound like much to call this the most romantic of all Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, but the danger Ingrid Bergman faces in spying on her Nazi husband at the behest of government agent Cary Grant is worth more than all the uranium ore in the husband’s wine bottles.

The Way We Were. When Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford get together, you just know it’s not going to work out, and it doesn’t. The perfect three-handkerchief movie about college activism, Red-baiting, and doomed romance.

Annie Hall. Woody Allen and Diane Keaton demonstrate what it’s like for a totally mismatched couple to fall in love and remain totally mismatched. The funniest of all the rare breed of romantic comedies with sad endings.

When Harry Met Sally. Can men and women be friends, or does sex always get in the way? Longtime friends Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan keep asking and asking, along with everyone in the audience who’s ever wondered about the same thing.

The English Patient. No, it’s nothing like Michael Ondaatje’s novel; it’s much less politically acute and much more sweepingly romantic, with Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas front and center. But sometimes that’s exactly what you’re looking for.

Pride and Prejudice. Want to spend five hours among hyper-articulate Regency types who take offense quickly and fall hard? The BBC’s Jane Austen miniseries will keep you enthralled courtesy of Jennifer Ehle, Colin Firth, and one strategically wet shirt.

Brokeback Mountain. What happens when cowboys fall in love with each other? Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger battle their repressive culture, the women who love them, and their own deeply ingrained prejudices to find out.

Sunrise. Nearly ninety years after it first appeared, F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece about George O’Brien’s improbable courtship of Janet Gaynor, the wife he’d plotted to kill, remains the most delicately touching of all Hollywood love stories.

Professor Leitch is available for interview. Contact [email protected] to arrange.