Diehl 40's Top 25 Romantic Comedies

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Sabrina 1954

Dir Billy Wilder
Humphry Bogart, Audrey Hepbern, and William Holden



Based on the Samuel A. Taylors romantic comdy entitled "Sabrina's Fair" which was publishe din 1953. Sabrina, a chauffeur's daughter, has fallen hard for the youngest Larraby sons. The Larraby's own numerous businesses and are loaded. The younger son never really notices Sabrina until after she returns home from cooking school in Paris, where her circumstances provide a complete makeover. She starts a romance with the younger brother which the older brother tries to sabatoge by pretending to love her and steal her away from his younger brother. The bottom line is that if his youger brother does not marry a particular woman the family will miss out on a huge merger that will substantially increase their wealth. Bogart's character, however falls for Sabrina also. In the end Bogart gets the girl buisnness be damned. I thought it was a great movie.



You can't make a rainbow without a little rain.



Sabrina 1954

Dir Billy Wilder
Humphry Bogart, Audrey Hepbern, and William Holden



Based on the Samuel A. Taylor's romantic comedy entitled "Sabrina's Fair" which was published in 1953. Sabrina, a chauffeur's daughter, has fallen hard for the youngest Larraby sons. The Larraby's own numerous businesses and are loaded. The younger son never really notices Sabrina until after she returns home from cooking school in Paris, where her circumstances provide a complete makeover. She starts a romance with the younger brother which the older brother tries to sabotage by pretending to love her and steal her away from his younger brother. The bottom line is that if his younger brother does not marry a particular woman the family will miss out on a huge merger that will substantially increase their wealth. Bogart's character, however falls for Sabrina also. In the end Bogart gets the girl business be damned. I thought it was a great movie.

I like this version of Sabrina, but I prefer the 1995 remake with Harrison Ford, Julia Ormond, Greg Kinnear.
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FWIW, Shakespeare in Love beat out Saving Ryan's Privates and The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar (thank god), so it happens sometimes these days too.

Oh, and, yeah, Annie Hall is one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Annie Hall is severely overrated IMO...Woody's made at least half a dozen movies that were better.








His Girl Friday 1940


Starring Carey Grant and Rosalind Russell. Although the film is laugh out loud funny it still has a fairly complex plot that prevents it from becoming to screwball. The story centers around the paper trying to halt an execution scheduled for the next day. Hildy (Russell) returns to the office to tell her ex she is getting married and is going to quit. Burns (Grant) decides to try to fight the Governor and regain Hildy by recruiting her to write the story about the execution. She is the best person to write the story and perhaps writing it will make her have second thoughts about leaving her job.




Mighty Aphrodite


As I was looking at some reviews as I was trying to place this movie on my list, and I was surprised to see that many did not like the Greek Chorus. That is one of the reasons I like the movie so much. I thought it was a fresh idea. I'd be interested to see what others on the site think about the Greek Chorus.

I LOVED the Greek chorus



It's nice to see some love for One Touch of Venus.

I love the 1941 version of Mr and Mrs Smith, but I haven't seen the 2005 remake. I'm not even sure that the 2005 version is a rom-com. It looks more like an action movie from the trailer.

I don't think the two movies titled Mr. & Mrs. Smith have anything to do with each other except the same titles.






Eternal Sunshine is one wild ride for a romantic comedy. The structure of the movie is non-linear. We see the events in Joel's (Jim Carrey) life as they are being erased from his memories. At some point in the process Joel decides that he wants to stop the erasure process, but he is unable. This makes the film structure harder to follow. (You probably need to watch it twice). I really like this movie, because of how its unique structure contributed to the story. I enjoyed trying to piece together the plot from the random memories they provide. This film was written by Charlie Kaufman, who had a great decade in the 2000's. He also wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Syndoche New York. it is currently one of my favorite movies.






Lady Eve


Many "screwball" comedies tend to loose their edge because everybody is a screwball and there is nothing sane from which you can judge how screwball the film is. The Lady Eve does not make that mistake. The sanity in this film is provided by Henry Fonda's role. In this film boy meets girl, boy exposes girl as fraud, and boy falls for girl a second time. I am finding that many of the romantic comedies I like the most are the films made before romantic comedy was even used to describe films. It happened on Night, Lady Eve, His Girl Friday, etc. are all excellent films that can be described as romantic comedy.