Gone with the script

Pop quiz: What's the most heart-pounding chase sequence in the history of film?

Is it A) Gene Hackman turning the streets of New York into a NASCAR strip during "The French Connection"? B) Indiana Jones's race to escape the world's largest ball-bearing in "Raiders of the Lost Ark"? or C) Billy Crystal's frantic sprint to a New Year's eve party so that he can declare his love to Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally"?

The answer is surely C). Harry wins for sheer endurance after waiting a whole movie to propose. Romance films, after all, are all about the thrill of the chase. They're a chance to vicariously experience the sheer giddiness of meeting someone special, and then successfully wooing them. Ultimately, romance films are love letters to the process of courtship.

As dating rules have changed over the decades, so, consequently, have depictions of courtship in film. Brad Pitt woos his leading ladies far differently than Cary Grant did. (Only James Bond, it seems, has defied cultural evolution. Nineteen films and four decades after the original, Bond still accomplishes his mission with a mere "Bond, James Bond" greeting at the roulette table.) Each decade of film reveals how Hollywood's script for love has changed.

In 1939, the film adaptation of "Gone With the Wind" became the "Titanic" of its day, except that the leading man of the former was actually old enough to grow facial hair. The poster for "Gone With the Wind" best captured the relationship between Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara. With the fires of the Civil war raging behind them, an open-shirted Butler cradles a heavily-cleavaged Scarlett in his arms. Audiences - and Harlequin Romance novel cover art - were wildly affected.

At a time when male prerogatives stil ruled supreme, Vivien Leigh's Scarlett was a new kind of protagonist. Feisty, strong-willed, and, yes, selfish, Scarlett bucks traditions of courtship by chasing the man she desires to marry - even when he is set upon marrying another woman.

A year later Katherine Hepburn showed a similar steely resolve in "The Philadelphia Story." As a wealthy divorcée equipped with a frosty sarcastic barb, Hepburn revels in her ability to shape her own marital destiny. Even her parents kowtow to her wishes! Of course, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart still find ways to woo her and etch away her icy exterior to reveal a vulnerable heart she's hidden away. Though "The Philadelphia Story" wasn't quite willing to overturn a traditional model of courtship, Katherine Hepburn - along with actresses such as Betty Davis, Lauren Bacall, and Barbara Stanwyck - presented a new era of cinematic goddess: one that men both worshipped and feared. These women were aware of their sexuality. They didn't order Betty Crocker recipes. And, unlike a 1930s actress like Olivia De Havilland, they wouldn't automatically swoon when the leading actor came up to the roulette table - even if he said his name was Bogart, Humphrey Bogart.

The '50s, seemingly, invented teenage dating - and the parental anxiety that often accompanied it. Picture this typical movie scene: Boy takes girl to the Drive-In movie theater; back at home, pops paces around the living room anxiously hoping his daughter will be back before pumpkin hour. Few movies capture this sort of angst quite like the 1950 comedy, "Father of the Bride." Spencer Tracy stars as a doting father reluctanct to see his only daughter (played by Elizabeth Taylor) on her way to the wedding altar. Sure, the young, upstart, groom-to-be comes home to pay his respects to the parents. But there's little doubt that it's the couple - not the parents - calling the shots, much to Tracy's dismay.

Bound by the Hays code, which detailed film "no-no's," mainstream American cinema in the 1950s remained chaste in its depiction of dating. Well, outwardly at least. Subtext and innuendo whispered of changes in a social order. After all, didn't Grace Kelly pack an overnight bag and nightgown when she came over to wheelchair-bound Jimmy Stewart in 1954's "Rear Window?" In that movie, Ms. Kelly unabashedly spends half the movie trying to convince commitment-shy Stewart that a diamond really is a girl's best friend.

While some '50s movies such as "Rebel Without a Cause" hinted at dark undercurrents of teenage sexuality, it was only later that movies such as "The Last American Picture Show" (1971) and, more recently, "Pleasantville" (1999) dealt more explicitly with teenage dating and illicit sexual relationships of the era.

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