by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

A couple of years ago, before the Plague forced us all to live underground like post-apocalyptic mole rats, my wife and I hopped on an NJ Transit train one Sunday and went up to New York City for the day. We did not visit the Empire State Building or Ground Zero. We didn’t go to the Met. We went to Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side. And when I sank my teeth into the corned beef on rye, I didn’t need to fake the orgasm. It was real. 

What we sought that day was more than just a perfect deli sandwich, we were also after American film history. The Katz’s scene in When Harry Met Sally landed big in 1989, not least because of the randyness of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm, an actor previously portrayed as a pristine American sweetheart, a pure Irish colleen. 

I feel like this movie helped reset the table in a number of ways. Not unlike Seinfeld, When Harry Met Sally played a part in ending the 80s and launching the 90s. Gone was the pegged jean, the checkered shirt; in was Swing music, hipsters, banter, and a calling back to the Good America of the 1940s and 50s. 

The 70s gave us Mean Streets and Parallax Views and a repudiation of the traditional past. The 80s gave us tits and apathy. The 90s was when the Boomers grew up and turned into their parents and grandparents. You should have seen the fedoras. You should have heard the harkening back. 

We loved that old school street talk in the 90s, the quick banter and the wisecracks – Aaron Sorkin will make a career out of this starting with his 1989 Broadway hit A Few Good Men – because the 60s and 70s had spent so much effort seeking authenticity and simplicity, and we were relieved to once again use language as a way to amuse, to be cleverly full of shit. We were bored of earnestness, and we’d had our fill of good intentions.

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The first great rom coms come out of a similar verbal culture of wisecracking, sarcasm and irony, back in the 1930s. You could go back ad infinitum before that. Shakespeare scooped the idea from the Greeks and turned out beauties like The Taming of the Shrew and As You Like It. But when it comes to Hollywood, the rom com is born in the Depression, when people needed – so desperately needed – a laugh or two, and the promise of a happy ending. Not surprisingly, given the prevailing economic conditions, early pictures in the genre – It Happened One Night, The Philadelphia Story – were much concerned with economic class. 

The Philadelphia Story is the better movie, but the sexual politics are icky. It Happened One Night is a classic road film, with a scruffy Clark Gable and a posh Claudette Colbert forced into the intimate proximity of that recent innovation, the road trip, making their way across country while despising each other. And, you know, also falling in love. Frank Capra directed long before he ever made It’s a Wonderful Life, and he kept it very chaste. 

Just before Rob Reiner sent Harry and Sally on their own road trip from Chicago to NYC in that sweet-ass Toyota Corona station wagon, he helmed The Sure Thing, a film which coopted the classic Capra flick in a number of ways, not least in a hitchhiking scene that is basically just a straight up lift.

Many knew Reiner as “Meathead” from All in the Family, or from the one-off perfection of This Is Spinal Tap. He is comedy royalty. His father Carl invented the sitcom with The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The screenwriter was no rube either. Nora Ephron’s parents wrote Desk Set. She was a splendid writer and wrote dialogue that crackles with wit and insight.

Ephron saw the male and female as two ways of being. Sally and her friends have lunch. Billy Crystal’s Harry and his best friend, the late lamented Bruno Kirby’s on-the-money Jess, go to the Meadowlands to see the Giants, or hit the batting cages. But there is a symmetry to the sexes. The women talk about the men all day and the men talk about the women. It’s like a reverse Bechdel Rule. 

The crosstalk reminds me of Amy Bloom’s maxim, “Dialogue is not conversation. Dialogue is conversation’s greatest hits.” The clutter, the ums and the aahs, these are all penciled out and the result is a kind of poetry, rhythmic and stylized, driven by sound and cleverness.

No man can be friends with a woman he finds attractive, he always wants to have sex with her.

So you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive.

Nah, you pretty much want to nail them too.

Romance, as we all know, is dead. It has been since Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. Because romance, as opposed to love or sex, is always about something already gone, lost to time, to some pure vanished past. This is why romantics like to turn the lights down low, to obscure reality.  

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It is a truism of Hollywood these days that middle-aged and older women have been rendered invisible in film, a criticism which is both dead true and all the more striking when we see the kind of terrific roles people like Kate Winslet and Nicole Kidman are playing, by way of contrast, on TV. 

In Desk Set (dir Walter Lang, 1957) this just isn’t a problem. Katherine Hepburn is 50, and yet the picture doesn’t bat an eye at her having a love life, and indeed being chased by two men: Gig Young as “Mike,” a character who might as well have @SecondBanana as his user name, and Spencer Tracy as the “efficiency expert” Richard Sumner. Tracy isn’t second anything. 

The plot hinges on whether four smart girls with telephones and the OED are smarter than a computer. They are. It also contains the most fun looking office Christmas party ever, and the sweet-ass mid-century art deco 1950s sets are smooth, clean and beautiful, and reflect that period in time when we thought things were getting better and  better.

But what I like most about this picture is the way Tracy and Hepburn eat sandwiches wrapped in paper and drink coffee on the roof of the office building. Sometimes it occurs to me that the Greatest Generation may have faced down the Depression, whupped Hitler, and remade America entirely on a diet of sandwiches and coffee. Studs. 

By the 60s things would change. Cleverness and badinage are suspect, because they are not considered to be authentic. Honesty is in. Letting it all hang out is the thing now. Yet romance hinges on mystery, that aching feeling of never knowing whether she loves you or not. That gorgeous painful brutal amazing feeling. But when the culture went counter-culture, the new way of sex was about putting it all out there. There is no romance in an orgy. 

The result is you end up with pictures like Harold and Maude, where Hal Ashby adds a gerontophiliac twist to the traditional story in order to let us see the romance. I didn’t like it, it brought out the rare bout of Irish Catholic morality in me. Still, though, who knew Ruth Gordon was such a GILF? 

From this era I prefer Barefoot in the Park, Neil Simon at his sweetest, Jane Fonda at her most heart-breakingly beautiful, Bob Redford all handsome and WASPy. But in the end, no matter how hard they tried, Hollywood could not make the rom com groovy. 

Romance sees love as a challenge, with obstacles to overcome. In reality love is less dramatic, it grows slowly over time, and thrives on familiarity, boringness, daily nonsense. But that is not the stuff of movies. Romantic comedies are only tangentially about love, in the way that Pulp Fiction was about that glowing thing in the briefcase. Rom coms are mysteries in which love is the MacGuffin. 

In 1989 a man and a woman walk through Central Park in the fall. She’s charming and beautiful but totally failing to pull off this Annie Hall-lite look. He looks like the front man for a Journey cover band from Bergen County. Still, there’s this chemistry, no sense pretending there isn’t. Burns and Albright, Harry the angst ridden Jew and Sally the Pollyanna shiksa. Can they be friends? Can men and women ever be friends? 

After two amusing backstory sequences, one on a cross country drive and another on a commercial flight, the story settles into its now after a cute re-remeet at Shakespeare & Co, in the room on the second floor with the big bright windows. Harry and Sally talk and find that they have each been hurt, and the pain gives them wisdom, as pain is wont to do. They seem grown up, and they are going to be friends. 

Another star of the picture, as many have noted, is the city of New York. In Rob Reiner’s hands the Upper West Side is as sweet and safe as an Ernst Lubitsch Budapest. Looking back now it’s hard to remember how much this take differed from the way we were used to seeing New York City at the time, as the dirty, grim, trash and crime-ridden shithole of so many countless crimers in the 70s and 80s. 

In the end, whether the city is real or not, the dreamy New York, with its Ray Charles and its Central Park in fall, is the perfect venue for Reiner and Ephron to work out their question: can we, as the song asks, “make two lovers of friends.” I’m not sure what they mean. Surely friendship and romantic love are two sides of the same coin. I don’t buy the dichotomy. Love needs friendship, too, and friendship is about love. 

But it doesn’t matter. Nor does the fact that Billy Crystal can’t really act. The picture, with its swing soundtrack, hits at just the right moment in time. A few months after When Harry Met Sally is released, the crowds began to gather at the Brandenburg gate and stone by stone they pulled down the Berlin Wall. And not long after that Cracker will assure us that what “the world needs now is another folk singer/ Like I need a hole in the head.” Spare us your hippies, we want a new Sinatra. Give us the old cool, the romance with all its longing and pain and style. We prefer the mystery.