Aside from the sublime dialogue, flawless performances, finger-clicking music, and drool-worthy Big Apple cinematography, there’s one genius innovation that made Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s 1989 film a huge success.
By the time Harry Connick Jr. whispers away at the end of When Harry Met Sally… we all know that the film’s title characters are perfect for each other. But what else do we know about them? The answer is “not very much.” We know that it takes Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) an hour and a half to order a sandwich and that Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) rates Maromar as “the best cookie ever,” but we don’t know, for example, whether they have brothers or sisters or whether their parents are alive. We don’t know if they were bullied at school, if they enjoy their job, or what their plans are for the future. I don’t know where they stand on today’s political issues. Still, these omissions are one of the key reasons why When Harry Met Sally is still considered one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, more than 35 years after its 1989 release.
Sure, there are plenty of other reasons, from the sublime dialogue to the perfect performances, from the finger-clicking music to the mouth-watering Big Apple cinematography. But the film’s true innovation lies in the way director Rob Reiner and screenwriter Nora Ephron strip away the biographical details of the characters just as they strip away every obstacle on their path to happiness. Everything is removed from this movie except for Harry and Sally’s love, sex, friendship, and attitude towards each other. The result is a distilled romantic comedy with romance and comedy and nothing else.
This is such a simple tactic and has such a fun result that it’s easy to forget how daring and unusual it is. But it’s much harder to think of a romantic comedy with similar undiluted purity. Contemporaneous productions include a fire chief with an inhuman long nose (Roxanne), a stockbroker who steals the identity of his boss (Working Girl), a widow obsessed with her fiancé’s angry brother (Moonstruck), and a produce wholesaler obsessed with mermaids (Splash). A look at When Harry Met Sally… reveals some universal truths about being single and falling in love. The working title was simply “Boy Meets Girl” because the emphasis is on the relationship between a man and a woman to the exclusion of everything else.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
