This tale of unquenchable young love enduring despite all that's thrown at it is so old fashioned it should have a preservation order slapped on it.

There's no irony, no knowing clever-dickery and none of the vulgarity that's managed to seep into contemporary rom-coms from the gross-out genre.

It's the story of two teenagers who meet, fall in love yet are forced apart thanks to snobbery and, to a lesser extent, Adolf Hitler.

Mill worker Noah Calhoun (Gosling) - you can tell he's working class as he never takes off his flat cap - falls for pretty southern belle Allie Hamilton (McAdams).

Her disapproving mother, Joan Allen, dismisses the tryst from the porch of her Charleston mansion as a summer romance until she realises it's much more.

"He's a nice boy but he's TRASH, TRASH, TRASH," she sympathetically reasons to Allie, before despatching her to a college out of reach in New York.

Meanwhile, Noah pens a love letter a day to his sweetheart only for wicked Joan to intercept them at the gate and Allie to conclude her big romance is over.

Heartbroken Noah subsequently heads off to Europe to lock swords with the Nazis and Allie takes a job as a hospital nurse where she meets her fiance, an injured officer.

Following demob, Noah heads back home, grows a beard, hits the bottle and occupies his time (and thoughts) renovating a dilapidated lakeshore mansion.

Then one day, Allie shows up at his front door. What is a smitten, fur-faced builder with just the hint of a drink problem to do?

Unashamedly romantic and venom-free, this flies in the face of current cinematic convention but could just be a hit with those who find Mills & Boon a bit too racy.

The nearest it comes to naughtiness is a topless Allie painting on Noah's porch (you don't get Hannah Gordon up to that on Watercolour Challenge).

Upping the tear-duct straining quotient is the fact the story is related by old codger James Garner to an old biddy (Rowlands) suffering from long-term memory loss.

No prizes for guessing who they turn out to be, but this has to be a first time that Alzheimer's replaces cancer as the disease de jour of a love story.

Tim Evans