The film follows Harry and Sally from their first meeting through to their long friendship and, eventually, the beginning of their romantic relationship. After meeting, the pair agree they will keep things platonic – because as Harry warms her, “sex always gets in the way.” Theirs is a connection built on conversation. On disagreements, debates, playful nonsensical bits, witty banter, teasing, laughing, chatting. As such, it remains a rarity in the rom-com world, bold in its commitment to capturing the nuances of a relationship through nothing but talk. You’ll find no unbelievable plot devices or magical kismet here. (You can find that kind of love, by the way, in Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, which also just so happens to feature Reiner as Tom Hanks’ friend.)

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Reiner, who had recently divorced from his first wife and was rather pessimistic about relationships in general, had approached Ephron with the initial idea. She was hesitant, but in Reiner, she found her inspiration for Harry.

“Rob is a very strange person,” she wrote in the introduction to the script. “He is extremely funny, but he is also extremely depressed – or at least he was at the time; he talked constantly about how depressed he was.”

It’s an odd, off-putting, but also an endearing cocktail of traits that Ephron captures to perfection in Harry. Harry who delivers the darkest jokes you’ve ever heard without batting an eye. Things like, “When I buy a new book, I read the last page first. That way, in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side,” or, “They should put the two sections together, real estate and obituaries– Mr. Klein died today leaving a wife, two children, and a spacious three-bedroom apartment with a wood-burning fireplace.”

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