Women, Men, Movies, and Romance

My husband and I saw Wedding Crashers this weekend. I was in the mood for a comedy, and I knew ahead of time that this one was going to be raunchy. While too much designed-for-the-male-sensibility raunch generally puts me off, I decided that I'd give this movie a try, and that if it was funny enough, I wouldn't care about the raunch. Well, my friends, it was definitely funny enough. It's not a great film, and the last half hour is rather slow (though it's enlivened by an inspired cameo), but it is an hilarious movie. Vince Vaughn's performance alone is worth the price of admisison.

But this post isn't really about Wedding Crashers. It's about the differences between what men and women find romantic, and, yes, that subject is already a cliche, made quite explicit in the scene in Sleepless in Seattle (an utterly unromantic comedy) where the woman tears up describing An Affair to Remember and Tom Hanks and his brother-in-law have a mock sob-fest over The Dirty Dozen. My husband prompted this line of thinking when he remarked that he was surprised that the crudeness of the humor in Wedding Crashers hadn't turned me against the movie, and that led to a discussion of what women actually find appealing or romantic in films (as opposed to the uninspired, pedestrian fare offered up by most contemporary "romantic" comedies), and then -- since my husband was hard-pressed to come up with a single movie scene he considered "romantic" -- to a question about whether men find anything romantic about movies or whether "romance" was an aspect of the cimematic experience that didn't much apply to men's assessment of the merits of any particular film.

Here's a brief, and by no means exhaustive, list of some of the film scenes that I consider romantic:

* The kiss on the Tuscan hillside in A Room with a View.

* Cary Grant taking Ingrid Bergman in his arms and carrying her down that long staircase at the end of Notorious.

* Harrison Ford dancing with the Amish woman to the accompaniment of the car radio in Witness.

* The look that Bill Pullman gives Sandra Bullock at the very end of While You Were Sleeping.

* The final scene of Breakfast at Tiffany's, accompanied by that lush Hollywood instrumental version of Moon River (which is probably the only theme song in movie history to substantially and all on its own improve the quality of the film in which it appeared).

* Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) taking Cathy (Merle Oberon) in his arms and guiding her to an open window so that she can see the moors a final time, in Wuthering Heights.

* Bette Davis looking at Paul Henreid as he greets his transformed daughter in Now, Voyager.

Do men have lists like this (that aren't of the Dirty Dozen kind)? Men, feel free to chime in and prove me wrong (or right). Women, feel free to add to my very truncated list with your own suggestions.

Update: I forgot the following:

* Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman) carrying the sick and heartbroken Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslett) to safety in Sense and Sensibility. It's interesting, by the way, that this scene doesn't occur in Jane Austen's book -- I find that film adaptations of Austen often render the stories more conventionally romantic than the novels themselves.

* Any time Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) looks at Elizabeth Bennett (Jennifer Ehle) in the A&E version of Pride and Prejudice.