The Notebook influenced The Notebook

Nick Cassavetes's film adapts Nicholas Sparks's first published novel, and it keeps the device the title names: an old man reading a written account aloud, daily, to a woman with dementia who does not recognise him. The summer romance separated by class and by a mother who hides the letters is the inner story, and the reading is the outer one. The film keeps both, which is what gives the last scene its weight.