You should watch it if you never have. There are too many clips that I want to share! I'll try to keep it as brief as possible...
Billy Crystal plays Harry Burns. Meg Ryan plays Sally Albright. They meet when they travel from Chicago to New York after they graduate from college. Sally's friend, Amanda, is dating Harry and sets up the road trip. Within 18 hours ahead of them being trapped in a car with each other traveling across country, Harry spits grape seeds all over the passenger window of Sally's car, they argue over who is more prepared for death, whether or not Ingrid Bergman's character made the right decision in leaving Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca", and discuss the main question of the entire film: Can men and women be friends?
Over the course of the movie, this main question resurfaces over and over. The story focuses a lot on the differences between men and women with Harry, more often than not, trying to rationalize his argument that men are right in most things and that Sally, and women in general, are wrong in *almost* every aspect of their thinking. But, since the story is written by Nora Ephron, it's not done in an insulting way at all. A lot of the dialog, especially between Sally and her friends, were based upon conversations between Nora and her friends. While Harry and his main buddy's dialog was based upon Crystal and Rob Reiner's friendship. I really like the way that Reiner, Ephron, Crystal and Ryan all worked together to make this movie as awesome as it is.
Back to the storyline: The story jumps forward in time as Sally and Harry's lives each go their own way, but periodically come back together. It's really great the way Ephron and Reiner worked the different phases of the story together. In between the timeline jumps, there are older couples who tell the story of how they met. It's really really adorable. I believe the couples are actually actors, but the stories that they tell are true stories. Rob Reiner collected 'how we met' stories to put in the film jumps. Genius! And super adorable. Here is a montage of all of the included clips of the older couples:
And of course, the number one scene from this movie is the deli scene when Harry talks about all the women he sleeps with and Sally sets out to prove that he can't tell if a woman is faking an orgasm or not. This became an iconic scene and was actually the brain-child of Meg Ryan! She decided that instead of having another go-round dialogue between Harry and Sally about women faking orgasms, she would just fake one. And she suggested the scene be in Katz's Deli. Billy Crystal added the line at the very end, which landed on the American Film Institute's top 100 movie quotes of all time. According to wikipedia, Rob Reiner tested the movie on some audiences and would watch the gender gap and all the women would laugh through this scene and all the men would just sit silently. When I've watched this movie with mixed company, I've seen the same thing happen! It is hilarious:
There are so many more scenes and awesome dialogue that I'd want to share. One of my favorite scenes is Harry and Sally singing "Surrey With the Fringe On Top" in the middle of a crowded department store. Or when Harry is at a football game with his buddy and he's talking about getting a divorce, and in the middle of his heart-breaking story, they do the wave.
Sigh. Just go watch this movie!
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