The actresses are spunky and sweet, but lacking in the vinegar that made Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve or Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night so definitively sexy. Those ladies were not always nice, and neither were their gentleman counterparts, who could be sarcastic, brutish and domineering when the mood struck.
By contrast, the romantic comedy leading men of today are the kind of nice guy - the Ralph Bellamy type - whom these earlier heroines would have triumphed by rejecting. The vision of love they embraced was not comfort and affirmation but a kind of grand, spirited struggle, what used to be called the battle of the sexes.
There have been a few skirmishes in more recent times: the oil-and-water of Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally or the Billy Wilderesque dance of Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire. But most of the time the truce has been declared in advance and scrupulously obeyed. And, perhaps more to the point, the few remaining stars who show the kind of audacity and charisma that great romantic comedy requires tend to be busy with other things.
And so the dry martinis of the past have been diluted. We emerge lulled and soothed, but rarely intoxicated.
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