This Is a Fine Romance

The literate adult romantic comedy is not dead, only scarce now as always. And when one comes along, it is an occasion for glad cries of joy and full houses.

There are ecstatic shouts and full theaters for the Rob Reiner-Nora Ephron “When Harry Met Sally . . .,” undoubtedly the literate adult romantic comedy of the year to date, linking the spirit of the great romantic comedies of Hollywood’s past with the textures and realities of life in a later and less easily romantic time.

Some of the language in “When Harry Met Sally . . .” would not have got past Leo McCarey, although at a guess Howard Hawks would have enjoyed the freedom to use it, as seasoning, the way it is used here.

There is a scene--I expect it will go into history as the Restaurant Scene--that would have given Will Hays, Joe Breen and the whole production-code staff collective apoplexy. But it is very funny and its punch line will join “Make my day” in the treasury of immortal movie quotes. Make my night, sort of.

Like “Moonstruck” and “Terms of Endearment,” “When Harry Met Sally . . .” can be said to address the difficulty of achieving love in a time when permissibility embraces everything except commitment, and sex has become a free-standing item, related to nothing else.

Granted, things have already begun to change and it has been announced from various rostrums that the sexual revolution is over. Yet we are not back in 1928 or 1938, not yet and not ever.

Harry and Sally can be seen as figures in a transitional landscape, trying to make their way from the strenuous demands of the anything-goes years to the heart’s continuing demands for a singular, knock-out, take-all-of-me love. It turns out, of course, that the hope of a steady relationship never really disappeared; it just waited on the sidelines during the feeding frenzy.

But while the eye of history can be focused on “When Harry Met Sally . . .,” what we have here are simply two charismatic individuals who talk wonderfully, appealingly and, above all, endlessly. The movie is articulation’s finest hours.

Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are working precisely the same turf as the glorious duos of the past: Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The territory doesn’t look or sound the same, but that’s because the world doesn’t either.

Yet the incidentals of language and even of the rites of courtship can’t obscure the truth that the fundamentals don’t change. The romantic impulse remains intact in Ephron’s vision and so does a kind of battered but game innocence and optimism.

It struck me once that the movies had spent more than half a century saying “They lived happily ever after” and the following quarter-century warning that “They’ll be lucky to make it through the weekend.” Possibly now we are entering a third era in which the movies will be sounding a note of cautious optimism: “You know, it just . . . might . . . work.”

Second-generation writers in Hollywood are relatively rare, but Nora Ephron is one. It is not clear whether the genetics or the home environment made the greater difference. But her parents, the writing team of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, wrote some of the brightest comedy around, on Broadway and then in Hollywood, for nearly 30 years, until Phoebe died in 1971. Their credits included “Daddy Long Legs” for Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, “Desk Set” for Tracy and Hepburn and “There’s No Business Like Show Business” for practically everybody.

Daughter Nora, who was associate producer as well as the writer on “When Harry Met Sally . . .,” has also written the semi-autobiographical comedy “Heartburn” and the gangster comedy “Cookie,” which is due out later this summer. In collaboration with Alice Arlen she wrote “Silkwood,” the angry drama with Meryl Streep as the woman mysteriously killed in a car crash after she blew the whistle on plutonium poisoning at the factory where she worked.

“Silkwood” reflected Ephron’s own career beginnings as a newspaper and magazine journalist. The satisfaction and the sympathy engendered by “When Harry Met Sally . . .” depend importantly on the fact that her characters (including Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher in the parts that Jack Carson and Eve Arden might once have played, and probably did) arise from a foundation of an astringently and accurately observed society.

The characters may be larger and God knows more voluble than life, but theirs is a recognizable yuppie world, real to the last Reebok.

And you don’t need an exit poll to know the film touches its audiences. You had only to look at the grins on the capacity crowd emerging from a Tuesday night showing in a San Fernando Valley multiplex.