“When Harry Met Sally” is perhaps best remembered for a scene in a delicatessen in which Sally demonstrates how to fake an orgasm.
As funny as the scene is, it is somewhat out of character for both Sally and the film, which isn’t at all risqué. The movie, in fact, should be characterized as the first and best of what could be termed the Meg Ryan-Nora Ephron trilogy.
The 1989 romantic comedy will be the Valentine’s Day weekend offering at Hoquiam’s 7th Street Theatre. It will be shown as part of the Theatre’s classic film series on Feb. 13-14.
During a nine-year period beginning with this film, Ryan played the female lead in three comedies written by Ephron (who also directed the final two).
“When Harry Met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993) and “You’ve Got Mail” (1998) weren’t part of a series, but contained very similar elements.
In all three, Ryan portrays a spunky, intelligent and doggedly romantic woman who begins the film paired with one character and ends it involved with another — twice with men she starts out disliking and a third with someone she doesn’t even meet until the final scene.
The lead characters spend much of their time discussing life and relationships with wisecracking sidekicks. Each movie features a soundtrack stocked with pop standards (if you consider Jimmy Durante singing “Make Someone Happy” at the end of “Sleepless in Seattle” a standard).
“Sleepless in Seattle” was enormously popular but too contrived and self-consciously retro for my taste. In contrast, I considered “You’ve Got Mail,” a sharp updating into the computer age of the anonymous pen pal story originally filmed in the James Stewart comedy, “The Shop Around the Corner,” to be underrated.
I would, however, agree with the critical consensus that “When Harry Met Sally” is the best of the lot. That’s partly because it has a better-developed story but also because it has a different director and lead actor than the other two.
Harry Burns (played by Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Ryan) first meet as college students in Chicago who car-pool to New York. Sally is initially unimpressed with Harry and particularly annoyed by his theory that men and women can never form a true platonic friendship because sex always intrudes.
After meeting a few years later in New York (it seems unlikely that these people would keep bumping into each other in a city that size, but people don’t go to romantic comedies for realism), they begin to form a friendship. Then, after their various relationships break up, it appears that Harry’s theory might come true — a development that Harry views with surprising ambivalence.
In terms of age (Crystal is 13 years older than Ryan) and appearance, Ryan was better matched with Tom Hanks, her co-star in “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.” But while Hanks is also the more versatile actor, Crystal was better suited to this role.
His character needs to be brash but also sensitive and vulnerable, qualities that Crystal possesses in abundance. As the late, great critic Roger Ebert once wrote, he is one of the few actors capable of making an on-screen apology believable. It is also hard to imagine Tom Hanks having second thoughts about sleeping with Meg Ryan.
“When Harry Met Sally…” also benefits from the direction of Rob Reiner, an accomplished filmmaker with a good sense of comedic pacing. Perhaps not coincidentally, he later played Hanks’ sidekick in “Sleepless in Seattle.”
Ephron, however, was a skilled screenwriter — one who merited an Academy Award nomination for this film. Her characters are smart, funny and likable. Even the viewers who reject Harry’s theories on male-female friendship tend to wind up rooting for him to beproven right in this case.
An acclaimed novelist and playwright, Ephron (who died in 2012) had a spotty career in films that did not star Ryan. She did earn another Oscar nomination for her first screenplay, in the decidedly unfunny 1973 anti-nuclear drama “Silkwood.” But her initial attempt at a movie script was a bizarre failure.
Ephron and her-then boyfriend, Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein (she skewered their short-lived marriage in the Meryl Streep-Jack Nicholson flick “Heartburn”) submitted a screenplay for the 1976 classic, “All the President’s Men.”
According to a Los Angeles Times article at the time, their draft portrayed Bernstein as a combination of Casanova and Sherlock Holmes, while depicting his partner Bob Woodward as a “vapid Elmer Fudd type worshipping at the shrine of Bernstein’s brilliance.”
Unfortunately for the couple, this script had to pass muster with executive producer Robert Redford. Even worse, Redford was playing Woodward. No dice.
As much as I love “All the President’s Men,” that was a shame. The Ephron-Bernstein version might have been even funnier than the delicatessen scene in “When Harry Met Sally”
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