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Best Romantic Comedies |
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James Clive Matthews is the author of two books of film criticism, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and blog editor for the BBC's Pocket Films site. Here he picks five romantic comedy films every home should have. Click to view Top 5 Best Romantic Comedies.
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Love's a Funny Thing ... |
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 As long as there have been men and women, there has been romance. And, let’s face it, the idea - and what it can do to people - is really rather funny. At least it is, so long as you are not one of the parties involved in the head-spinning, heart-thumping irrationality that comes along with it. |
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Watching two people who evidently fancy each other desperately try not to make fools of themselves is one of the most ridiculous things life can produce. Little wonder, then, that romance has been such an important part of comedy for centuries – beaten only, perhaps, by the even more fundamentally funny sight of someone being hit around the head with something.
Be it Don Quixote questing after “Dulcinea”, Benedick and Beatrice trying to resist the inevitable in Much Ado About Nothing, or Harlequin and Columbine in the Harlequinades of the Commedia dell’arte, as long as romantic confusion isn’t happening to us, it’s hilarious. |
From silents to the 60s... |
 With silent comedy relying so much on the old Vaudeville slapstick routines that had sprung from the Commedia dell’arte and its off-shoot, pantomime, in the late 18th century, it was not until the dawn of the sound age in the late 1920s that film comedy was able to begin to rival the complexities of stage romances. By the mid-1930s, slapstick had been replaced by dialogue-heavy screwball, which reached its apogee in 1938’s insanely fast-paced RomCom Bringing Up Baby. |
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| After the war, screwball began to give way to a gentler style of comedy – a softer, more relaxed style to put everyone at ease in the age of the atomic bomb. Walt Disney was the perfect comfort blanket, and his Lady and the Tramp, released in 1955, not only epitomised that lost 1950s golden age of family values, but has also become the first romantic comedy that many of us will ever have seen. |
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 The 1960s was a decade of culture clashes, with the Civil Rights movement coming to a head in the United States. At the movement’s height, just a few months before the assassination of Martin Luther King, a truly remarkable film appeared. 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner helped as much as anything to show that the Civil Rights Movement had right on its side, highlighting the sheer ridiculousness of racial prejudice while at the same time demonstrating just how many hurdles had to be overcome. Now the battle has been won, the film’s humour – essential to keep the preachiness to a minimum – has won through. |
To the present... |
And then, of course, there’s the angst – the little fears and anxieties so perfectly expressed by Woody Allen in his 1977 masterpiece, Annie Hall. A glorious exploration of every aspect of a relationship, it briefly proved to Hollywood that commercial success was possible even while packing your film full of jokes about psychoanalysis and literature.
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 On the back of Annie Hall’s success, the intelligent wit of the 1930s screwballs had a brief resurgence, until the romantic comedy was reformed anew by the final film in the selection, 1989’s When Harry Met Sally. Splicing the intelligent cynicism of Woody Allen with the sentimentality of the 1950s and rapid-fire dialogue of the screwballs, this tale of an unlikely yet inevitable pairing has provided what is, in effect, a “film it by numbers” guidebook to every romantic comedy made since – from the quirky friends to the misunderstood kisses, the love/hate relationship to the last-minute reconciliation.
In the past two decades, few RomComs have come close to When Harry Met Sally, or to any of the others in this selection – but we are overdue a new style for this genre, which has constantly evolved with the times. We shall see. For now, the Top Five selected here represent all that is best in the genre. |
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