Howard Hawks played many variations on this formula in films like Twentieth Century (with John Barrymore as a theatrical impresario and Carole Lombard as the temperamental actress he discovered) and His Girl Friday (with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as formerly married journalists wrangling in the newsroom).
Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn struck sparks (both on screen and off) in the first movie they made together, Woman of the Year, and they continued to spar in many of their later romantic comedies, most notably in Adam's Rib, when they played married lawyers who found themselves on opposite sides of a criminal trial. In some of the most memorable scenes in that movie, their verbal jousts give way to physical jabs, as when he slaps her behind while giving her a rubdown and later when she kicks him viciously in the shins.
In Pillow Talk (1959) and again in Lover Come Back (1961), Doris Day and Rock Hudson also played professional rivals who engaged in lies, dirty tricks and sadistic humiliations before their inevitable final clinch. A higher level of danger entered the picture in Hitchcock's 1959 caper, North by Northwest, when Cary Grant exchanged teasing innuendoes with the sultry Eva Marie Saint, who happened to be in cahoots with the spies plotting to kill him.
Stanley Donen's Charade (1963) worked its own stylish variations on the Hitchcockian formula. Grant and Audrey Hepburn slipped into a mating dance flecked with menace; she was unsure until the very end of the movie whether he was a lover or a murderer in search of the fortune left by her late husband. The movie was criticized at the time for daring to mix lighthearted romantic comedy with macabre violence, an explosive combo that is driven to its illogical conclusion in Mr and Mrs Smith.
It seems likely that Simon Kinberg, the writer of Mr and Mrs Smith, and Doug Liman, the director, had some of these earlier movies -- or more recent iterations, like John Huston's Prizzi's Honor and Danny De Vito's War of the Roses -- firmly in mind while they were creating their black comedy. But this new picture highlights the dramatic changes in the cinematic landscape over the last half century.
What could once be expressed entirely in witty repartee and suggestive physical byplay (like Colbert extending her leg to flag down a ride in It Happened One Night), or later in the brutal verbiage of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, now requires the kinetic energy of punches, kicks, shooting and stabbing.
Movies have grown darker over the decades, but they've also grown more insecure. Filmmakers and studio executives no longer trust such niceties as dialogue, characterization, style or even movie-star charisma to involve viewers in lovers' conflicts. Instead, today's filmmakers feel the need to pump up the volume and ramp up the firepower to make sure they hold the interest of impatient audiences.
Yet Pitt and Jolie, though backed by a deafening array of explosions, can't escape their challenge in this one. There is virtually no supporting cast; the only other actor with a significant role, Vince Vaughn, doesn't even get a screen credit. So the two stars, if they succeed in igniting the box office, may not exactly revive the genre of scintillating romantic comedy. But they will have kept it from dying out altogether.
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