Top 10 Meet Cutes for Valentine's Day
Where would a classic romcom be without a meet cute - that moment when fate brings two strangers together in an unlikely encounter that changes their lives forever? This Valentine's Day, why not settle down with a romantic comedy from Cinema Paradiso and reminisce about meeting your own soulmate?
The 10 selections at a glance
Our complete selection
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
One of the greatest meet cutes cues up the action in perhaps the finest screwball comedy. Taking a break from piecing together a Brontosaurus skeleton, museum palaeontologist David Huxley (Cary Grant) is playing golf with a potential sponsor when free-spirited heiress Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) plays his ball. Unconcerned, she also drives off in his car, with the hapless Huxley standing on the running board. Carole Lombard was initially sought for Susan, while Grant was only hired after the producer nixed director Howard Hawks's suggestions of Harold Lloyd and Ronald Colman and Robert Montgomery, Fredric March and Ray Milland all turned down the chance to co-star with Hepburn, a leopard named Baby and a terrier called Skippy, who was played by George, who was best known for essaying Asta with William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man series (1934-47), all seven of which are available from Cinema Paradiso.
Annie Hall (1977)
Having played mixed doubles together, Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) and Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) meet in the foyer after changing. In a delightfully awkward exchange, Annie finds herself burbling ('la-di-dah') as she tries to make small talk about Alvy's racket skills and whether he needs a lift uptown. As former lovers, Allen and Keaton bring an easy naturalism to a scene that became all the more iconic because of what the latter was wearing: a white men's shirt, baggy beige trousers, a black waistcoat, a navy tie with white polka dots and a black bolero perched on the back of her head. Keaton deservedly won the Oscar for Best Actress, while Allen was rewarded for his direction and co-written screenplay, as this kooky love story also took the award for Best Picture. A discarded whodunit subplot was later recycled for Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993).
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
Having just graduated from the University of Chicago in 1977, Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) meet for the first time for an 18-hour drive to NewYork, during which they argue about his contention that men and women can never be friends because 'the sex part gets in the way'. The byplay between the leads is superb, but it's Nora Ephron's Oscar-nominated screenplay that makes the exchange so eloquently amusing and enables director Rob Reiner to keep the pair bumping into each other over the next 11 years before they finally realise they're destined to be together. Co-starring with Tom Hanks, Ryan would reunite with Ephron for Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You've Got Mail (1998), which respectively riffed on Leo McCarey's An Affair to Remember (1957) and Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which all contain meet cutes of their own.
Out of Sight (1998)
In the wrong place at the wrong time, federal marshall Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) is bundled into the boot of a car during a Florida prison break and finds herself spooning with Jack Foley (George Clooney) during a high-speed getaway. Refusing to be intimidated or charmed, she accuses Foley of thinking he's Clyde Barrow before they embark upon a discussion of three Faye Dunaway movies, Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975) and Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976). Sandra Bullock was originally in the frame for Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of Elmore Leonard's hard-boiled thriller, but Lopez excels in this claustrophobic scene, in which she dismisses Clooney's contention that he could pick her up in a bar and complains that Dunaway and Robert Redford get together too conveniently in Pollack's gripping take on James Grady's thriller, Six Days of the Condor.
Notting Hill (1999)
There are two meet cutes for the price of one in screenwriter Richard Curtis's classic romcom. William Thacker (Hugh Grant) first meets film star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) when she visits his travel bookshop and he waffles about guides to Turkey while she browses. But he gets to bump into her again minutes later, when he spills an orange juice over her white top and persuades her to pop into his nearby house in order to clean up. Having worked so successfully with Grant on Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Mike Newell was offered the chance to direct, but Roger Michell landed the gig after Newell opted to make Pushing Tin (1999). Curtis slipped a bit of product placement into the closing scene by having Grant read the novel he was adapting for his next picture, Louis de Bernières's Captain Corelli's Mandolin (John Madden, 2001).
Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
The New Year turkey curry buffet in Sharon Maguire's adaptation of Helen Fielding's bestseller affords viewers the chance to witness a re-meet cute. As her mum introduces Bridget (Renée Zellwegger) to Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), she reminds him that Bridget had run naked across the lawn while playing in his paddling pool. However, it's Bridget's torrent of banal chit-chat that prompts Darcy to inform his own mother (within Bridget's earshot) that he doesn't want a blind date with 'some verbally incontinent spinster, who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and dresses like her mother'. Seems to have worked out well in the end, though, as Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) duly followed. Zellwegger received Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations. Yet, Toni Collette, Helena Bonham Carter, Cate Blanchett, Emily Watson, Rachel Weisz, Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet were all considered before her.
Maid in Manhattan (2002)
Not all meet cutes happen spontaneously. Some need intricate setting up, like the one in Wayne Wang's romcom, which sees single mom and chambermaid Marisa Ventura (Jennifer Lopez) try on an expensive coat belonging to socialite Caroline Lane (Natasha Richardson), just as, elsewhere in the hotel, her 10 year-old son (Tyler Posey) befriends senatorial candidate Christopher Marshall (Ralph Fiennes) and brings him back to the room that his mom is cleaning to ask if he can walk Marshall's dog. Seeing Marisa in the Dolce & Gabbana, he naturally presumes she's Caroline and yet another screen romance begins with a slight misunderstanding. Teenpic maestro John Hughes was originally slated to direct Hilary Swank before Lopez came aboard. She wound up with a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress, while Time magazine included this in its Top 10 Worst Chick Flicks. But the meet cute's a well-polished gem.
How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)
When it comes to convoluted set-ups, nothing tops the preamble in Donald Petrie's romcom, as Andie Anderson (Kate Hudson) embarks upon an assignment for Composure magazine to snare and alienate a man in 10 days, while advertising executive Benjamin Barry (Matthew McConaughey) has to show his boss that he knows enough about romance to land a prestigious diamond campaign. So, when Ben's workmates choose Andie from across a bar as the girl he has to woo, she decides he's the perfect dupe for her article and goes along with his spiel during a slickly scripted first conversation in which each communicates in single-word questions and answers. This was originally going to be a Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle before she decamped to Bruno Barreto's View From the Top (2003). Ironically, it was on Paltrow's Goop podcast that Hudson claimed McConaughey had been a bad kisser in Andy Tennant's Fool's Gold (2008).
Just Like Heaven (2005)
Forever in search of novelty, screenwriters occasionally ask audiences to accept somewhat far-fetched premises. Take the first meeting in a San Francisco apartment between widower David Abbott (Mark Ruffalo) and doctor Elizabeth Masterson (Reese Witherspoon) in Mark Waters's undervalued romcom. As David shuffles back from the fridge with another beer, he walks into a screaming Elizabeth, who clearly doesn't know that he has rented her home because she has been in a coma for several months after crashing her car en route to a blind date. This isn't the only spectral meet cute available from Cinema Paradiso, however, as Kate Andrich (Emilia Clarke) and Tom Webster (Henry Golding) discover in Paul Feig's Last Christmas (2019), which Emma Thompson and Greg Wise concocted from the Wham song of the same name and which includes a doozy of a meet cute involving a pooping bird.
Trainwreck (2015)
Part of the genius of the movie meet cute is that there's often nothing cute about it. Few people make a worse first impression than hard-partying men's magazine writer Amy Townsend (Amy Schumer) in Judd Apatow's anti-romcom. Sent by S'nuff editor Dianna (Tilda Swinton) to profile sports doctor Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), Amy gets off to a dreadful start by failing to recognise basketball legend LeBron James in his office. But she compounds the problem by attempting to cover up her disinterest in sport by making up the names of the small-time teams she professes to prefer to the majors. And, to top it all off, she makes a clumsily racist remark and gets caught in a lie about having lots of Black friends. It's not exactly loathe at first sight, but it's a squirm-inducingly innovative way to bring together a mismatched couple. Screwball lives!
More about these films
Where would a classic romcom be without a meet cute - that moment when fate brings two strangers together in an unlikely encounter that changes their lives forever? This Valentine's Day, why not settle down with a romantic comedy from Cinema Paradiso and reminisce about meeting your own soulmate? Even, if you're single, try renting one of the films on our list to see if you can pick up any handy hints. You never know, you might even have a meet cute of your own on the way to the postbox to return your rentals!
No one's entirely sure where the term 'meet cute' came from. What seems to be agreed is that it was Hollywood shorthand for the scene in which the male and female leads first bump into each other in a romantic comedy.
As mismatched couples were a key ingredient of most screwball comedies in the 1930s, it's safe to assume that the phrase originated during the writing of gems like Ernst Lubitsch's Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), a remake of Sam Wood's 1923 silent Gloria Swanson vehicle that was scripted by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. In order to bring Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert together on the French Riviera, Wilder (who kept a special meet cute notebook) drew on his own sleeping attire preferences in order to have millionaire Coop try to buy a pyjama top and fellow shopper Colbert offer to help him out by purchasing the bottoms.
Sadly, this Lubitsch masterpiece isn't currently available to rent. But you can hook up with the scene again, courtesy of veteran screenwriter Arthur Abbott (Eli Wallach), who recycles its premise while telling newspaper columnist Iris Simpkins (Kate Winslet) about the perfect love scene in Nancy Myers's The Holiday (2006). This has a meet cute all of its own, of course, as Iris's brother, Graham (Jude Law), drunkenly bangs on her door in the middle of the night without knowing that she had contracted a house swap with movie trailer producer, Amanda Woods (Cameron Diaz).
By all accounts, the first printed usage of the term comes in The Case of the Solid Key (1941), a locked room mystery by Anthony Boucher, in which an actress named Sarah Plunk tries to cool the ardour of writer Norman Harker with the lines: 'Last night was nice, but this is today. We met cute, as they say in story conferences; but people don't live cute. You can't be high-romantical all day; not if you're trying to work.'
Despite his popularity as a whodunit and science fiction writer, Boucher (who was actually called William White and also used the pen name H.H. Holmes) never saw any of his books adapted for the screen. By contrast, playwright George Axelrod was a favourite with studio producers, even though he lampooned Hollywood hype in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Filmed by Frank Tashlin in 1957, this canny satire includes the following speech by advertising executive, Irving La Salle, Jr. (John Williams): 'Dear boy, the beginning of a movie is childishly simple. The boy and girl meet. The only important thing to remember is that - in a movie - the boy and the girl must meet in some cute way. They cannot meet like normal people at, perhaps, a cocktail party or some other social function. No. It is terribly important that they meet cute.'
Critics have found the term very useful, including Roger Ebert, who confessed to having devised a meet cute of his own in the screenplay for Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) in order to bring two characters together at a wild party. In modern romcoms, such happenstances often feel cornily contrived. But the best are staged with a degree of wit and winsomeness that makes them impossible to resist.
Later this year, Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson are due to star in Alex Lehmann's Meet Cute. But such meetings are not the exclusive preserve of romcoms. Just ask Leonardo DiCaprio, who became involved in two of the best, when he gazed at Claire Danes through a fish tank in Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996) and saved Kate Winslet from a watery demise in James Cameron's Titanic (1997).
