Billy Crystal, Bruno Kirby, Carrie Fisher and Meg Ryan star in When Harry Met Sally .
When Harry Met Sally
They wanted to make a New York romantic comedy about a witty, neurotic Jewish guy and a tall, blond, pretty, also neurotic goyishe gal. Somehow Woody Allen didn't sue for copyright infringement. Somehow When Harry Met Sally... clicked. Reiner, Ephron, Crystal, Ryan & Co. dipped into a subgenre that stretches back to Charlie Chaplin's tramp-meets-blind-girl sentiment and forward to Knocked Up, another relationship comedy where talk is the glue that holds together the sex. (Which has to be the ungainliest metaphor I've ever committed to print.) It also had the orgasm scene — where Sally (Ryan) embarrasses Harry (Crystal), loudly fakes a sexual climax in Katz's Delicatessen, and at an adjacent table a middle-aged woman (Estelle Reiner, the director's mother) tells a waiter, "I'll have what she's having."
The idea for the film, as articulated to Ephron by Reiner, is that two single people become best pals, decide they won't have sex because it would ruin their friendship, then have sex, and it ruins their friendship. The movie very smartly plays on the stereotypical, and real, difference between men and women. She thinks a guy she's had sex with should stay overnight; he wants to be out the door without a postcoital hug, analysis or cigarette. Harry tries to be a loyal buddy. When Sally tearfully autocriticizes, "I'm too structured, I'm completely closed off," he purrs, "But in a good way." Wrapped in the fantasy of asexual intimacy, she talks to Harry as if he's a girlfriend, which both compliments and neuters him. They swap stories about their love affairs, which makes her envious and him horny. Men, women: they annoy each other so much, they must be meant for each other.
When the film came out I was very fond of it. But then, everybody involved in When Harry Met Sally... was on a roll. Reiner had directed two terrific pictures, This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride, and a third, Stand by Me, that a lot of people liked. Ephron wrote the acerbic marital comedy Heartburn. Crystal had graduated from Saturday Night Live to leading-comic movie status with Throw Momma from the Train and seemed a perfect opposites-attract mate for Ryan, the cutie from Top Gun and Innerspace. (Crystal's turn here, and the success of the movie, basically won him his four-year gig as host of the Oscars.) But time can tarnish reputations — anyway, they can fade — and I approached this 18th-1/2 anniversary edition warily, like someone bumping into an old flame decades later. I was afraid the movie would remind me When Billy and Rob and Nora Were Funny, and Meg's Perkiness Hadn't Congealed into Mannerisms.
Well, the thing still works. It's more aggressive in its cadging for laughs than An Affair to Remember, more reluctant to go for the big emotional moment. But Harry's not that kind of guy, and it's his movie: the rare (at the time) male-skewing romantic comedy. The Reiner film also doesn't go for the emotional jugular, or ventricle; even in its most intense exchanges, Harry and Sally are careful to make their geshreis funny. Maybe Reiner, Ephron and Crystal didn't go on to do better than this, but that doesn't dilute the quality of this film. When Harry Met Sally... is good enough. And if it can seem fresh after all this time, chances are it will when it celebrates its own 50th anniversary edition, which people will watch on a two-inch telephone, or maybe routed directly to their brains.
The commentary track from the writer, director and male star is all right. Ephron remembers who came up with some of the best lines, Reiner reminds us four or eight times that he met his present wife on the set, and Crystal is still the funny man. Looking at his coiffeur in an early scene, set in the 70s, he says, "When I came on I called Jack Lord and said, 'Can I borrow your hair?'" Everyone pokes gentle fun at Reiner's depressive nature; Ephron tells him, "It was sort of like this stuffed pet you brought with you." Reiner worries some more when Crystal quotes one of the film's four-letter jokes: "Didn't they say during the commentary we're not supposed to use bad language? But there's bad language in the movie!"
"Bad language"? It's like it's 1957 again, and Rob is 10.
1989; Director: Rob Reiner: Writer: Nora Ephron
With Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Carrie Fisher, Bruno Kirby, Estelle Reiner
MGM Home Entertainment
Available Jan. 15, List Price $19.98
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