Look at any list of the ‘greatest ever romcoms’ and you’ll find When Harry Met Sally near the top of the list, if not heading it. This 1989 movie, directed by Rob Reiner and written by the late Nora Ephron – with terrific performances from Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as the title characters – is about as good as the genre got, the high peak of romantic comedy before its slump to the present day. With its New Year’s Party ending and rendition of ‘Auld Lang’s Syne’, it’s also the perfect film to watch in the week after Christmas (hence, no doubt, the BBC’s decision to screen it this coming 30 December).
New York looks blow-dried, glossy and gleaming. Central Park in autumn is ravishingly on fire
Is there anyone over 35 who hasn’t seen it? For those who haven’t, the movie, set mostly in 1980s New York, asks a perennial question: can men and women ever really be friends or does sex always get in the way? We watch as over twelve years the title characters – Harry Burns and Sally Albright (smart names, we realise) – meet and hate, then befriend and rely on each other, before wrecking it all (perhaps) with a one-night stand. Looking on are their two best friends, played, delightfully, by Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby, for whom – SPOILER ALERT – the course of true love runs a lot more smoothly. But the decades-long grope towards romance between Harry and Sally – one so pessimistic, one so bright and sunny – is part of the fun of the film.
Nora Ephron, in a later interview, was keen to stress the difference between Christian romantic comedies and Jewish ones. In the first, she said, there was usually a visible obstacle to the romance; in the second, there was no obstacle at all except for the man’s neuroses. This film, very much the Jewish kind, sprang from long, confessional conversations Ephron had with director Rob Reiner, whose marriage had broken up and who was dealing uncomfortably with the dating scene. The truths Reiner revealed to her about men, she said, were ‘all the things you hope no one will ever tell you.’ In return she assured him that women often faked orgasm; Reiner, initially incredulous (‘Not with me!’) found that just a little research proved Ephron right.
All these things would go into the movie, as well as Ephron’s tendency – copied by Sally – to make numerous amendments when ordering off a restaurant menu. Virtual newcomer Meg Ryan, having read for the part of Sally, was judged ideal: ‘We all knew within a week of shooting,’ Ephron said of her, ‘that a jackpot was going to be hit.’ Reiner, who considered himself Harry’s prototype, said it could only be played properly by his old friend Billy Crystal. The rest, as they say, is casting history.
Now a classic, When Harry Met Sally wasn’t universally loved on its release. Many critics said it was over-influenced by Woody Allen, with its jazz soundtrack, its lingering shots of New York landmarks, and its Jewish angst in Billy Crystal’s performance.
No one could deny Allen’s influence on the film – it’s plastered all over the screen – but does it matter? Ephron/Reiner’s film isn’t so much abject imitation as their love-letter (or even thank you letter) to a director whose work they (and so many of us) clearly adored. Besides, comparisons can be drawn too with About Last Night (another hit film of the decade) or the fireworks between Sam and Diane in that US 80s sitcom without equal, Cheers. Similar ingredients to them all, yet a subtly different dish.
But just like Allen’s 1977 Annie Hall, When Harry Met Sally is a series of exquisite comic moments – Harry and Sally sniping about love on an airport escalator, the matchmaking dinner which goes horribly wrong (or right), the series of long-married couples (played by actors, but scripted from the real thing) talking to camera about how they met. It also, of course, has that scene in the delicatessen, where Sally puts down her turkey sandwich to fake a tumultuous orgasm in public, and whose inception is a story in itself. A moment suggested by Ryan, it required her to do numerous, gruelling takes over the course of a day, after Reiner had given a noisy rendition of what it should look and sound like. The scene was criticised, by Roger Ebert among others, for betraying the film’s ‘realism’: ‘I didn’t believe any woman would ever do that.’ He is right, but it just doesn’t matter. That orgasm became more famous than the film itself and was even parodied on The Muppet Show, with Ryan replaced by Miss Piggy.
If the film caught the zeitgeist between men and women – when the sexual revolution (raging in Annie Hall twelve years before) had calmed down and was revealed not to have changed very much – it’s also now very much the picture of a lost America. In 1989, the country was confident and breezy after 8 years of Ronald Reagan. Nixon’s disgrace and the Kennedy assassination had faded into the background, while Carter’s downbeat speeches on American ‘malaise’ were a thing of the past. America was just about to win the Cold War (I saw the film for the first time in Los Angeles, a week or two after the Berlin Wall fell) and really did seem to set the standard for us all.
Accordingly, the film has generosity to spare and is unashamedly full of the Good Life. New York looks blow-dried, glossy and gleaming in this film. Central Park in autumn is ravishingly on fire, and the characters seem to veer from riverside restaurant to uptown bookstore, from baseball game to hotel ballroom. Everyone, whether they’re arguing over furniture or hauling home Christmas trees, is making an effort to keep life splendid, and appears virtuous for doing so. What stops the film – which seems at times shot through a lilac gauze – from moving into chocolate-box territory is the quality of the writing and its pin-sharp depiction of the abyss between men and women, who, despite all the bafflement and frustration, retain a basic goodwill towards one another. This warmth is notable in the chemistry between Crystal and Ryan, as they bicker and heart-to-heart their way to intimacy: ‘It feels,’ said Ephron, ‘as if they’re crazy about each other.’ The war between the sexes, though crackling away all right, still hasn’t gone to Def Con 3.
‘It’s the job of a man to try to understand the nature of a woman. It’s the job of a woman to try to understand the nature of a man. And, by doing so, we can kind of forge a détente,’ said Reiner – which is as good a New Year’s resolution as any. Such a staple film has it become for the night, there are even sites telling you exactly what time to start watching, so as to count down to 1 January along with the characters. Most of us wouldn’t go that far, but a year that begins with Ephron’s masterpiece can’t be all bad. 35 years on and still glowing with good humour, When Harry Met Sally remains one of the wisest, snappiest romcoms ever made.
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