Why is it so hard to make good romantic comedies?
What was once a taken-for-granted staple of movies is now scarcer than those proverbial hens’ teeth.
Turner Classic Movies programs batches of great oldies with actresses like Irene Dunne and Jean Arthur who did their best work as romantic comediennes and others such as Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert and Katharine Hepburn who excelled in the genre.
These thoughts were triggered by seeing “27 Dresses” a few nights ago, a largely failed attempt to charm and amuse an audience with a tale of contemporary romance.
Katherine Heigl seems to have been made for romantic comedy — she’s pretty in the non-threatening girl next door manner of Dunne and Arthur and radiates sanity and charm in equal measure.
Heigl’s looks and talent have made her a TV star on “Grey’s Anatomy” and positioned her for big screen stardom, but where are the polished romantic comedy scripts that could make her the next Meg Ryan or Julia Roberts? (The answer to that rhetorical question seems to be — Nowhere — which is why Ryan has been largely off-screen for years and Roberts took the supporting character role she plays in “Charlie Wilson’s War”).
The tired plot and the inane situations Heigl is put through in “27 Dresses” would have defeated the biggest stars of the 1930s and ’40s (indeed, most of the great romantic comediennes of the Golden Age found themselves stuck in the occasional dud by the studios that held their contracts — it is painful to watch the almost always delightful Jean Arthur in the horrendous 1943 picture “A Lady Takes a Chance” in which the star must have felt forced to overact in order to try to spark humor and romance out of her painfully remote co-star John Wayne).
What’s so sad about the dearth of good romantic comedy these days is that there is still a huge audience that hungers for movies in this genre — junky recent efforts like “Music & Lyrics” and “No Reservations” and “27 Dresses” have all sold more tickets than they deserved to because moviegoers looking for love and laughs have had nowhere else to go.
Have all the clever romantic comedy ideas been used up? Is the post-feminist dating world an inhospitable place for funny romantic women?
On TV, “Sex and the City” proved that the modern male-female dating relationship scene could still produce glossy hilarity — in 30-minute doses — but no recent film has come close to that HBO series in terms of hooking an audience. It will be very interesting to see if the forthcoming movie version of the HBO hit can sustain the premise — and do something the TV show didn’t already do — in a feature-length format.
