Excerpted from FALLING IN LOVE AT THE MOVIES: Rom-Coms from the Screwball Era to Today by Esther Zuckerman. Copyright © 2024. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
THE MEET-CUTE
If you know one thing about the rom-com, you know about the “meet-cute”—the adorably happenstance way in which the two lovers in one of these movies first encounter one another. The meet-cute has been around as long as love stories themselves, but over the years it’s evolved from a term used by screenwriters and studio executives into something everyone with a passing interest in rom-coms is aware of.
The culprit? Nancy Meyers’s The Holiday. In Meyers’s Christmastime house-swap film, Kate Winslet’s character Iris, having given her English country cottage to a movie trailer producer (Cameron Diaz), is driving in Los Angeles when she encounters an elderly man (played by the legendary actor Eli Wallach) confused on the road. She stops to get out and help him. When she delivers him to his doorstep, he tells her that this was their “meet-cute.” She’s puzzled. (She’s from England, you see, and not familiar with Hollywood jargon at all.) “It’s how two characters meet in a movie,” he says. “Say a man and a woman both need something to sleep in and they both go to the same men’s pajama department. And the man says to the salesman, ‘I just need bottoms.’ The woman says, ‘I just need a top.’ They look at each other, and that’s the meet-cute.”
Wallach’s character, it turns out, is a screenwriter who becomes Iris’s confidant as she navigates her own romantic entanglement. And the scenario he describes is the one from Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938).
The screwball Bluebeard’s, which was cowritten by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, opens with Gary Cooper’s business tycoon Michael Brandon shopping at a store on the French Riviera. Despite being a multimillionaire, he’s cheap and only wants a pajama top to sleep in. The salespeople are baffled and refuse to sell him just one part of the set. Then, Claudette Colbert’s Nicole arrives. She solves the problem because she only needs pajama bottoms. He’s smitten and she’s unaffected. Though he wonders if she’s on a shopping trip for a lover, he ultimately discovers that she had purchased those pants for her father, a faded French aristocrat who will do anything for a quick buck. The plot goes haywire from there. Michael desperately wants to marry Nicole. Nicole’s father wants her to say yes for Michael’s money. She’s at first resistant, but then submits. Alas, on their wedding day she learns that he’s been married seven times before and only goes through with it to make a buck on a prenuptial deal. Their meet-cute is, indeed, very cute.
Since The Holiday, it feels like the public popularity of the idea of the meet-cute has almost ruined the meet-cute. When a rom-com takes the very phrase as its title, as it did with the forgotten 2022 vehicle starring Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson, there’s an argument to be made that it’s lost its spark. (In that movie there’s a time machine and she’s actively trying to engineer the meet-cute.)
Where did the term come from anyway? The columnist Jack Smith considered himself one of the foremost researchers of the subject. In a 1983 column in the Los Angeles Times, he wrote: “When the definitive history of Hollywood and the movies is written, the ‘cute meet’ or ‘meet cute’ may receive only a footnote, but if my research is quoted in that footnote, I will treasure it as my claim to immortality.” Well, Jack, this is not the definitive history of Hollywood in its entirety, but your work has stood the test of time. Throughout the column in question, Smith is concerned with whether the official term is “cute meet” or “meet cute.” It doesn’t really matter, but I appreciate his diligence.
Smith quotes the actor Tommy Vize, who claims the term was invented by the legendary agent Swifty Lazar, which made its way into George Axelrod’s play and movie Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (The movie came out in 1957.) The journalist also cites the screenwriter and novelist Anita Loos, of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), whom some other sources credit with the invention of the verbiage for “meet-cute.” Loos said: “A cute meet is when Claudette Colbert is in an elevator and drops her purse and a monkey wrench falls out of it and hits Fred Mac-Murray on the foot.” Colbert and MacMurray were an early screwball romance team, though MacMurray is arguably better known for playing the horrible boss in The Apartment and the man taken for a ride in Double Indemnity before going on to sitcom stardom.
Beyond Loos’s description, what defines a “meet-cute”? As far as I see it, the partners can’t know each other already, and there must be an element of somewhat absurdist coincidence. A hint of serendipity if you will; a dash of happenstance. (And, yes, one happens in the 2001 movie titled Serendipity. Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack are both glove shopping.) It’s not necessary for a rom-com to have a meet-cute. For instance, I would argue that When Harry Met Sally . . . does not have a meet-cute. Harry and Sally have prearranged to drive from Chicago to New York together. Their meeting isn’t cute; it’s planned. Now, you could argue that when they encounter each other later in the story in the Upper West Side’s Shakespeare & Co. bookstore and her friend Marie (Carrie Fisher) tells her, “Someone is staring at you in Personal Growth,” that’s a meet-cute. But it’s not their first encounter. The meet-cute is secondary.
The purest meet-cutes are the ones that thrive on improbability, and it helps if they have a hefty dose of sexual spark.
In Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant’s paleontologist David Huxley first encounters Katharine Hepburn’s heiress Susan Vance on the golf course. She steals his ball and he is unperturbed by it. They encounter each other yet again at a fancy restaurant. He slips on an olive she was trying to pop in her mouth. She gets him accused of thievery and then he accidentally rips the back off her dress, forcing him to walk behind her to save her modesty. It’s meet-cute after meet-cute after meet-cute, the aggravation ultimately yielding chemistry, with a hint of nudity.
This is why the screwballs were so great at meet-cutes. With the thinly veiled innuendo of the Hays Code era and the crackling energy of the material, these meet-cutes are propulsive. The meet-cutes of later rom-coms sometimes strain to match the charm of their predecessors.
