Two for the Road (1967 Stanley Donen)

What I'd really like to ask Frederic Raphael - and he is still alive, so I could - is: was your original script written in this jumbled up, non-linear way, or did Donen do that? (Since asking that question I bought the published screenplay. It is written exactly in this way, making it one of the best and cleverest screenplays ever.)

This even includes the trick of seeing the different time periods overlap within the same scene, viz. where the newer versions of themselves pass the old ones by on the road. It's very clever, and manages an insightful, trenchant look at a relationship along the way.

Also very funny, not just in Hepburn's ghastly wardrobe, but in lines like "The girls were absolutely potty about you and so - heaven knows - were you" and the shot of lobsters followed by the sunburned couple.

They were certainly happier in the old days.

Claude Dauphin is the client and Nadia Gray his wife, William Daniels and Elenor Bron the offensive Manchesters ("Howie, you're the biggest untapped pocket of natural gas known to man"), Georges Descrières the smooth lover and it's not in fact Jacqueline Bisset's debut (she had already been in The Knack, Casino Royale, Drop Dead Darling  and Cul-de-Sac).

Far too easily dismissed as a star vehicle travelogue romcom, film fully embraces the nouvelle vague and is dazzling, sardonic, tender, loudly funny and unbeatable.

First saw it on TV on 25 July 1977 and grew increasingly to love it over many viewings, including a memorable cinema screening in Paris on 24 October, 1992.

The line that we keep misquoting is in fact "No Ruthie, I didn't. I did not. No. No, I didn't. No."

But where is that hotel?