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by Mark Brinkerhoff
That sound you heard this week? It likely was #FilmTwitter collectively reeling from reading The Ringer staff’s list of the 50 “best” romantic comedies of all time. What prompted such a breathless response, however, was that only one of the films on the instantly infamous list pre-dated the 1980s, and it *wasn’t* Annie Hall. No, that Best Picture-winning, genre-redefining classic didn’t make the top *50*, Harold and Maude did.
Now far be it for me to quibble about anything the late, great Hal Ashby made (namely Harold and Maude) but the otherwise ignorance of literally more than half a century of not only the very best rom-coms, but some of the finest films of all time—period—can’t go unnoticed. So with that, here’s a non-exhaustive, chronological list of the “best” rom-coms from the genre’s Golden Age in the ’30s through its modernization in the ’70s/’80s with links to where you can watch them...
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