Apart from the sublime dialogue, flawless performances, the finger-clicking music and the mouth-watering Big Apple cinematography, there’s one genius innovation that made Rob Reiner and Nora Ephron’s 1989 film so successful.
By the time Harry Connick Jr is crooning 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 much. We know that Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) takes an hour-and-a-half to order a sandwich, and that Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) rates Mallomars as “the greatest cookie of all time”, but we don’t know if they have any brothers or sisters, for instance, or if their parents are alive. We don’t know if they were bullied at school, or if they enjoy their jobs, or what their plans are for the future. We don’t know where they stand on the political issues of the day. And yet those omissions are one key reason why When Harry Met Sally… is still regarded as one of the finest romantic comedies ever made, more than 35 years on from its release in 1989.
There are plenty of other reasons, admittedly, from the sublime dialogue to the flawless performances, from the finger-clicking music to the mouth-watering Big Apple cinematography. But the film’s true innovation is the way its director, Rob Reiner, and screenwriter, Nora Ephron, strip away the characters’ biographical details, just as they clear away all the obstacles on their path to happiness. Everything is removed from the film except Harry and Sally’s attitudes towards love, sex, friendship and each other. The result is a romantic comedy distilled to its essence: it has romance and it has comedy, and it has nothing else.
It’s such a simple tactic, with such a delightful outcome, that it is easy to forget how bold and unusual it was. But it is far less easy to think of a romcom with anything like the same undiluted purity. Take a look at those being made around the same time, and you’ll see a fire chief with an inhumanly long nose (Roxanne), a stockbroker who steals her boss’s identity (Working Girl), a widow who is smitten with her fiancé’s angry brother (Moonstruck), and a fruit-and-veg wholesaler who is smitten with a mermaid (Splash). Take a look at When Harry Met Sally… and you’ll see some universal truths about being single and falling in love. It is so devoted to male-female relationships, to the exclusion of all else, that its working title was simply “Boy Meets Girl”.
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