When Harry Met Sally… addresses the question, can a man and woman be friends?  The man and woman in this movie, who must navigate between sex and friendship, are Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan).  They meet right after college, sharing a drive from Chicago to New York City, during which time Harry declares that a man and a woman cannot be friends because sex gets in the way.  At the same time, despite their disagreements, we can see that they like each other.  In the years that follow, their paths keep crossing, until they finally end up getting married.

It is interesting that Billy Crystal is just over five feet, six inches tall, while Meg Ryan is five feet, eight inches tall.  When she wears pumps, the heel is at most one inch.  Because they are about the same height, with her being just a little taller, it is easy for us to believe that they are just friends.

In Casablanca (1942), Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) are passionate lovers, despite the fact that Bogart is five feet, eight inches tall, while Bergman is five feet, nine inches.  However, the way they are filmed together makes it appear that he is a little taller than she is, which was a pretty good trick since we see them dancing together.  Maybe she was barefoot and he was the one wearing heels.  Anyway, the countenance of Bogart as opposed to that of Crystal also makes a difference.  We cannot picture someone who looks like Bogart even bringing up the subject of friendship with a woman.

I mention the movie Casablanca because Harry and Sally discuss it several times over a period of eleven years.  The first time is when they are driving together to New York.  On another occasion, they watch it together on their respective television sets while in bed and on the phone with each other.

In their first conversation about this movie, Harry says that Rick wants Ilsa to leave, which is why he puts her on the plane.  Harry doesn’t say why Rick wants Ilsa to leave, but the reason given in the movie is that Rick has decided that fighting the Nazis is more important than the love Rick and Ilsa have for each other.  The idea is that Ilsa’s husband, Victor Laszlo, needs Ilsa to support him in his fight to free his country from tyranny, and so Rick and Isla must sacrifice their love for the greater good of mankind.  Sally argues that Ilsa wants to leave with Victor for socio-economic reasons—she would become the First Lady of Czechoslovakia—even though the marriage would be passionless.  (At a later point in the movie, Sally denies she ever said such a thing.)

Harry couches the choice for Ilsa as either having “the greatest sex of your life” with Rick or having a passionless marriage to Victor for the sake of prestige.  Sally accepts this characterization of Ilsa’s relationship with Rick.  In other words, neither one of them says that Rick and Ilsa are in love with each other.  But when Casablanca was made, we were supposed to think of their relationship as one of true love.

Do we even believe in that kind of love anymore?  When Harry Met Sally… continually gives us reasons to be cynical.  For example, at the beginning of the movie, before he gets in the car with Sally, Harry is kissing a woman and telling her that he loves her.  Years later, he can’t even remember her name.  And if “great sex” is now the replacement for “true love,” even that must be viewed with a jaundiced eye.  Sally says that she has learned from several of her girlfriends that marriage ruins sex, which means that if Ilsa had stayed with Rick, their marriage would likely have ended up being passionless too.  After all, the sex Victor and Ilsa had in the early days of their marriage was probably pretty good too.

At the end of Casablanca, Rick says to Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”  Harry says, “Best last line of a movie ever.”  It is, of course, a friendship between two men, but we are encouraged to think of the friendship between a man and a woman as something that can be beautiful as well.

But let us examine this supposedly beautiful friendship a little more closely.  It was Louis’s practice to allow a married couple to leave Casablanca provided he got to have sex with the wife.  On two occasions, we see him smirk as he anticipates his next victim.  I would not want to have anything to do with someone like that.  His sexual extortion doesn’t seem to bother Rick, although he did interfere with Louis’s plans for the wife of one young couple.  Taking pity on her, Rick let the husband win enough money at roulette to allow him and his wife to leave Casablanca without her having to degrade herself.  That irked Louis since he was looking forward to having sex with her.

We are, of course, supposed to see an analogous situation between Rick and Ilsa when she has sex with him to get the letters of transit that will allow her and Victor to leave Casablanca.  But in the case of Rick and Ilsa, we know it is true love.  With Louis, on the other hand, he enjoys having sex with desperate women even though he knows how much they despise him for it.  And yet, the fact that Rick is willing to regard a friendship with a man like that as being something beautiful is still warmly applauded by most people that watch this movie, including Harry, apparently.

Periodically during this movie, elderly married couples are interviewed, assuring us that there is such a thing as a happy marriage, one in which there is a sexual attraction between the couple, as well as a fondness for each other that would otherwise be thought of as friendship were it not for the fact that they are married.  In this way, we are prepared for Harry and Sally to achieve a synthesis of sex and friendship when they finally get married and become one of the interviewed couples themselves.

Without these interviews, we would not have taken the happy ending seriously.  I’m not sure we take it seriously even then.  Perhaps that is why the greatest love stories are those in which the man and woman are not together at the end, such as Gone with the Wind (1939), Brief Encounter (1945), The Way We Were (1973), and, of course, Casablanca.