The sex part always gets in the way

Rating: 8/10 (20 February 2010)

In 1977, Harry Burns and Sally Albright have just graduated from the University of Chicago and meet when both need someone to share the drive back to New York. During the journey they start discussing their ideas about relationships. Sally believes that it is possible for men and women to enjoy platonic friends without sexual or romantic attachments; Harry disagrees, claiming that "Men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way." Harry and Sally do not stay in touch after arriving in New York, but they meet again by chance five years, and yet again five years after that. The film then traces the course of their relationship following this third meeting. There is also a subplot about a parallel romance between their respective best friends, Marie and Jess.
The film is a romantic comedy with a difference. The plot of the traditional Hollywood rom-com tends to be centred upon some obstacle to the love of the young couple and tells the story of how that obstacle is removed or overcome. In "When Harry Met Sally" there is no obstacle to the love of Harry and Sally- except perhaps their refusal to admit that there is no obstacle. The plot, in fact, is a good deal less complicated than that of many romantic comedies, and we know that it is only a matter of time before Harry and Sally will fall for one another. This, of course, raises the question of which of them was right in their original disagreement. The obvious answer, of course, is that Harry was; he and Sally did not succeed in remaining "just friends" but ended up going to bed together. Yet in another way Sally was correct. Friendship and romantic love (which is about a lot more than mere sexual attraction) are not as distinct from one another as Harry assumed, and the first can be seen as a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition of the second.
What sets this film apart, however, from the hundreds of bog-standard rom-coms which Hollywood has churned out over the years is neither the plot nor the ideas discussed but the standards of the script and of the acting. Billy Crystal, another diminutive Jewish New Yorker who began his career as a stand-up comedian, has always struck me as a younger, better-looking version of Woody Allen, and his films often remind me of Allen's. "Forget Paris" had something in common with "Broadway Danny Rose", and "When Harry Met Sally" seems to have been influenced by "Annie Hall", another romance set in New York. Harry wisecracks his way though the film like Alvy Singer (and many other Woody incarnations), although he is more self-confident and less neurotic than most of Woody's characters, and Sally may owe something to Diane Keaton's Annie. Even the use of a split screen to show both main characters simultaneously when they are not together is derived from the earlier film.
The script is officially credited to Nora Ephron, but in fact much of the dialogue appears to have been contributed by Crystal and the director Rob Reiner, a close friend of Crystal's, and some of the incidents were based on happenings in Reiner's t own life. The film's most famous scene is, of course, the one in the restaurant where Meg Ryan pretends to have an orgasm; the restaurant in question, Katz's Deli in Manhattan, is a real institution, and now marks with a commemorative sign the table where this scene was shot. There is also some very funny dialogue, much of it well up to Woody Allen standards. ("Harry, you might not believe this, but I never considered not sleeping with you a sacrifice").
Both the sparklingly witty Crystal and Ryan are brilliant as the main characters, so much so that one overlooks the age discrepancy between them. (Harry and Sally are supposed to be contemporaries, but in fact Crystal is thirteen years older than Ryan). It is strange to thing that Ryan was not the first choice for Sally; that was apparently Susan Dey, with Ryan several names further down Reiner's list. Although Meg had played the female lead in a few earlier films, such as "The Presidio", this was the one that really made her a star, and lead to her becoming one of Hollywood's two great romantic comedy queens of the nineties. (The other was Julia Roberts). Ryan was to work together with Ephron in two of her future rom-coms, ""Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail". Here her Sally is an enchanting, angelic-looking girl, although one who has her own eccentricities. Besides her tendency to fake orgasms in inappropriate locations, she can be infuriatingly picky about her food, leading Harry to dub her a "high-maintenance" woman. (The film was, allegedly, responsible for popularising this particular usage, although here Harry is using the phrase to mean that Sally demands a lot of attention, not, as it is often used today, to mean that she demands that he spend a lot of money on her).
I would not rate the film quite as highly as "Annie Hall", but then for me very few films can rank with Woody at his best. "When Harry Met Sally" is certainly one of the best romantic comedies of the eighties- indeed, it is probably my favourite except for "Crocodile Dundee". 8/10