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In the late 1960s, when the era of the extravagant big screen movie musical was coming to its end, director/choreographer Stanley Donen, who made such classics as On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, shifted creative gears and collaborated with screenwriter Frederic Raphael to create one of the most beautifully told, bittersweet movie romances of all time, Two for the Road.

Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney star as Joanna and Mark Wallace in a rather complex narrative that covers a dozen or so years in their lives, as seen from different French holidays they experienced over the years. Donen interweaves and overlaps flashback segments framed by the couple’s present vacation to a beach in the south of France where they met and fell in love years before.

While very appealing with its romance and comedy, the film is really a serious exploration into the function of the modern marriage and how a couple evolves from their earliest happy and romantic days through times of bickering, parenthood and to moments of infidelity and eventual reconciliations. Four or five significant flashbacks occur as Joanna and Mark reflect on what kept them together. Both actors were in their prime of youthful popularity: Finney a few years off his roguish Tom Jones popularity and Hepburn coming off the success of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and My Fair Lady. Both, according to Hepburn biographer Donald Spoto, had a somewhat secret off-screen romance while making the film, which made their on-screen chemistry completely believable and dynamic. This tender and realistic look at a couple’s love/hate relationship is ever so charmingly accented by an unforgettable Henry Mancini musical score and remains one of the great hidden gems of the ’60s.