Love in the Afternoon

She plays the cello. He plays the field. She's coltishly young. He's worldly and mature. Love struck conservatory student Ariane knows she's not like millionaire American playboy Frank Flanagan. But if she pretends to be just as much a cosmopolitan lover as he is, maybe the magic of l'amour will take hold.May-December romance is in bloom when Billy Wilder directs and Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper meet for Love in the Afternoon. Laughs, Parisian settings, champagne elegance - Wilder, in his first collaboration with long-time co-writer I.A.L. Diamond, delivers them all in a soufflé-light homage to his filmmaking idol Ernst Lubitsch, punctuating it by casting Lubitsch alumnus Maurice Chevalier, the cinema's ambassador of Gallic charm who smoothly plays Ariane's detective father.