WOMEN KNOW THE SECRET OF

"WHY HARRY MARRIED SALLY"

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Classics like "Sunset Boulevard"; "Chinatown"; "The Deer Hunter"; "Blade Runner"; "The Godfather"; "The Garden of the Finzi-Contini's" and "Dog Day Afternoon" and everything else I have forgotten to list are the films I save for special occasions (stay posted for upcoming favorite films list).

Whenever "When Harry Met Sally" plays on television, I drop everything to watch it (for the 40th, 50th? time). Why? Because it is the most on-target movie about relations between the sexes ever made.

Nora Ephron--youare The Queen of the Universe.

Meg Ryan (Sally) and her best friend, Carrie Fisher, could be any woman talking about men to her best friend. Ryan's approach is that love will happen when it's meant to; Fisher maintains a file of available men (including those about to be divorced). Ryan dates men many times before she contemplates sleeping with them.

But Harry and Sally are friends, too.

Billy Crystal (Harry) has sex with everyone he dates, even women he dislikes and never plans on seeing again. Crystal thinks of himself as being loose, hip, and free-spirited. He perceives Ryan as rigid and methodical--she has a file box indexing all her videos. Crystal is constantly going to baseball games and batting practice with his best friend, Bruno Kirby. Ryan hangs out with the gals and yaks.

Yet herein lies the movie's greatest paradox: In her own way, Sally is less inhibited than Harry. Repeated viewings make it crystal clear that Billy Crystal fell in love with Meg Ryan the first time he met her, when they were driving from college to New York City and stopped off at a diner and she placed her eccentric dinner order. He knew then that this was a woman who was independent-minded and did things her own way. Ephron's details are both equisitely-honed and hysterically funny: the guys talking about meeting chicks while having to stand up and participate in "the wave" at a baseball game; Ryan methodically checking each letter she deposits into a mailbox before Crystal snatches the entire batch and shoves it down the slot. When Fisher and Kirby meet and are instantly attracted, Fisher corrals Ryan in front of a shoestore and says "Look! Red pumps! I need a pair", so she can sneakily question Ryan about Kirby before they can hop into a cab to go off and make passionate love together. All that meticulous preparation on Fisher's part--the index cards,the filofax--and then love came, as it always does, when she least expected it. But it's the red pumps part that brings the point home, sinces women who love sex possess the Imelda gene.

The famous Katz's Deli scene, in which Ryan questions Crystal about how he can be sure the women he sleeps with have orgasms is the scene in which he falls madly and irrevocably in love with her without even realizing it. She tells him, as she's eating her sandwich, that all women will, on occasion, "fake it". "Not with me," he macho-ly retorts. She places her lunch on her plate, and with the aplomb of a ballerina easing into a grand jetee, fakes an intense, lengthy, screaming, pounding on the table orgasm, flashes him a quick smile, then sanguinely resumes munching away. At first embarrassed, the perfectly-cast Crystal, who specializes in nice-guy embarrassed grimaces, just watches her in amazement, as does every other patron of the restaurant. As her peformance grows ever more authentic and dramatic, and with Ryan seeming to be utterly oblivious to the fact that she's in a public place, his admiration soars.

Who's really uptight--him or her? It's easy to go out and sleep with endless women, tricking them into thinking you're making a commitment when you have no plans of ever seeing them again. But Sally can only fly when she feels secure enough to do so; and she only allows herself to admit that she loves Harry when she feels he has matured enough to be her partner. Watching his face in Katz's Deli, at first apologetic to the people surrounding them and then awestruck at her volcanic eruption, women viewers know that he'll eventually end up proposing.

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