Good chemistry between lead actors, hard enough to get on its own, means little without good writing. I think of the dialogue in the best romantic comedies -- say, "The Palm Beach Story" or "Holiday" -- as somehow needing to "catch." That catch can be breathtakingly perfect, like a sprocket clicking into place, or just a little discomfiting, the way a swirling float of fabric might snag itself on a nail. Take the moment in "The Lady Eve" when Stanwyck and Henry Fonda -- they're on a ship together, they've just met, he's a shy reptile specialist who's been off collecting snakes in the wild, she's a wily cardsharp who's well on her way to seducing him -- are just about to part for the evening: "You certainly are a funny girl for anybody to meet who's just been up the Amazon for a year," he says. "It's a good thing you weren't up there two years," she volleys back, an easy backhanded toss.

That line is just a few ticks of the clock off. It makes no sense until it circles back on you a second later, by which time it makes perfect sense. It's the sort of exchange you can't imagine Richard Curtis (who wrote both "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill") or Nora Ephron (the evil mastermind behind "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail") coming up with. In fact, when Ephron needs snappy dialogue, she handily adapts it: "You've Got Mail" is based on Lubitsch's lovely 1940 film "The Shop Around the Corner," written by Samson Raphaelson. Raphaelson's name is included in the credits of "You've Got Mail." But it's still interesting that in the movie's pivotal scene, where Hanks and bookstore owner Ryan meet in a cafe (they've been e-mail pen pals for a while; Hanks knows her identity, but she doesn't know his), the dialogue obviously parallels that of Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart in "The Shop Around the Corner." (Even worse, Ryan is clearly aping Sullavan's light-as-raindrops delivery, and she can't pull it off.) In the hands of a more skillful writer, the sequence could have been pulled off as an homage. But Ephron flattens it out so much that it seems like nothing so much as old-fashioned laziness, a way to catch a free ride on the earlier movie's magic.

The problem isn't that these new romantic comedies rely on formula. The best romantic comedies ever made were built on a dependable structure: Boy and girl meet, hate each other and spend the rest of the picture discovering they're perfect for each other. That's the armature for all the jokes, the sly flirtations, the heated arguments and tender reconciliations that make the genre what it is. And as hateful as it is when old codgers (or young ones) prattle on about how much better movies were in the old days, the simple truth is that romantic comedies just were better in the '30s and '40s. There are no contemporary equivalents of Sturges, Lubitsch or Hawks, people who could brush the everyday travails of courtship with so much wit and magic.

Yet there are directors who have tried, with varying degrees of success, to revive the spirit of the old romantic comedies, giving them a modern, edgy twist: Jonathan Demme with "Something Wild," Kenneth Branagh with "Dead Again" (really more of a thriller than a comedy, strictly speaking, but one that's both lyrical and jazzily syncopated in its romanticism), Danny Boyle with "A Life Less Ordinary," Richard Linklater with the exquisite "Before Sunrise."

Mainstream audiences may consider some of those movies too offbeat. But even mainstream romantic comedies, with the right kind of writing and some creative casting, could be so much sharper, smarter and funnier -- not to mention more romantic -- than they are. There are too many good actors who go untapped for these roles: Daniel Day-Lewis and Ewan McGregor have both been terrific as romantic leads, and I get the sense they could be funny as hell in a romantic comedy. It's time for John Cusack -- a fabulous lead in teen romantic comedies -- to get more of those roles in movies geared toward adults. George Clooney has already proved how perfect he is for the genre in the otherwise depressing "One Fine Day." Rupert Everett, an actor who understands instinctively the difference between smoky eroticism and your basic garden-variety sexiness, is devastatingly funny (and deeply, deeply romantic) in Oliver Parker's upcoming adaptation of Oscar Wilde's "An Ideal Husband."

Angelina Jolie, astonishing in "Pushing Tin," has sex appeal and feline wit in spades. Cameron Diaz -- whose good timing in "There's Something About Mary" and "A Life Less Ordinary" is more than a match for her good looks -- may be one of the few modern actresses capable of doing screwball roles without making them shrill and unbearable. Anne Heche, Julianne Moore, Regina King, Marisa Tomei (who seems to be making riskier choices these days, on the basis of her roles in "Welcome to Sarajevo" and "The Slums of Beverly Hills"), Angelica Huston, Sharon Stone (whose understated, foxy sense of humor has always been underappreciated): They're all actresses who know how to swing -- 5/4 to Meg Ryan's 4/4.

With talent like that, there's no reason this shouldn't be a terrific time for romantic comedies. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of contemporary moviegoers who hope -- as well as deserve -- to see something good now. Something that reflects their own experience but, even better yet, elevates it, showing them a world in which people are smart, funny and pleasing to look at but still have to master the elaborate, excruciatingly lovely minuet that goes with falling in love, just as the rest of us do. Why are these movies so few and far between? Are "Notting Hill," "You've Got Mail," "While You Were Sleeping" and countless others the movies we really deserve? Or do we accept them because they're about as good as we can expect to get?

Going to the movies is a lot like love. You can always settle for less. But why on earth would you want to?

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