Film	Valentine's Day in Black and White by M. Faust

Did romance exist before the movies? I suppose it must have, but you have to admit that Hollywood perfected it with sophisticated women and beautiful men trading witty dialogue while overcoming artificial obstacles to the kind of rapturous love that only had to last until the words “The End” left us to imagine that they could keep it up for the ensuing lifetimes. And if not, well, there was always another movie to repeat the process.

For me, a perfect movie romance is always a romantic comedy. Who wants love if it doesn’t make you laugh? And while the genre isn’t entirely dead—you could do worse than to check HBO’s schedule for Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore in last year’s Words and Music, especially if you harbor fond memories of the 1980s—it soared during the 1930s and 1940s.

I admit to being a Turner Classic Movies junkie. How I got by in those days when Adelphia Cable refused to program the channel, I don’t know. But we have it now, to prove on a daily basis how wrong that Paul Simon song is: Just about everything looks better in black and white. There’s not much playing in theaters right now that I could recommend for Valentine’s Day viewing. On the other hand, there are plenty of movies showing on TCM between now and VD that I can heartily recommend you record on DVR, TiVo or even VHS. A pizza, a bottle of wine and a Cary Grant movie—what could be better?

What could be better is two Cary Grant movies (and two bottles of wine, if you’re so inclined). For a perfect double feature, record The Awful Truth (1937) Monday at midnight and My Favorite Wife (1940) Wednesday at 12:15pm. The film that made Grant a star, The Awful Truth is a perfect example of the screwball comedy. Opening with the divorce of Manhattan swells Grant and Irene Dunne, it charts the inevitable and hilarious path by which they are drawn back together, largely through jealousy when they find new partners. As Dunne’s new swain, Ralph Bellamy plays the same kind of sincere hayseed he did a few years later in His Girl Friday, again romancing Grant’s ex-wife (Rosalind Russell). Bonus: Asta the dog, from The Thin Man movies and Bringing Up Baby.

My Favorite Wife reteams Grant ad Dunne as a couple sundered not by divorce but by a plane crash. She’s been lost on a desert island for years, and makes her way home just as her husband is preparing to remarry. Complicating this further is fellow she was stranded with, a hunky colleague whom Grant refuses to believe was entirely honorable. Said colleague is played by Randolph Scott, Grant’s real-life roommate for years. The two were often accused of being bedmates as well; whether you credit that or not, it’s hard not to watch him here and wonder what sort of children such a pair might have engendered given a different biology.

A little Grant always leaves you wanting more, and TCM has in fact scheduled a whole day of his films on Wednesday. Most of them are unlikely to fit your VD requirements; still, as long as you’re setting the timer to record there’s no reason not to have copies of Father Goose (1964), with Grant as a drunken bum forced into monitoring a South Pacific island by the Navy, and then caring for a boatload of schoolgirls who wash up on his shore (the star said it was the film that came closest to capturing his real personality) or the bizarre Once upon a Honeymoon (1942), with Grant and Ginger Rogers in Europe tangling with Nazis.

Seen all of those recently? Don’t worry, there’s lots else to record and have on hand. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (Monday, 8pm) is for many the epitome of screwball comedy, with Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress unaware that her newfound traveling companion (Clark Gable) is really a reporter out to get her story. Roman Holiday (Wednesday, 10:15pm) is a similar story set in Europe, with Audrey Hepburn as a runaway princess and Gregory Peck as the newspaperman.

Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (Tuesday, 3:45pm) stars Jack Lemmon as an aspiring executive who hopes to get ahead by letting his superiors use his apartment to meet their mistresses, only to find out that the elevator girl (Shirley MacLaine) he’s had his eye on is having an affair with his boss—who wants to borrow the key.

You can call it kitsch, but I’ve always had a soft spot for those Rock Hudson-Doris Day comedies. Lover Come Back (Thursday, 2:15pm) replays the premise of Pillow Talk, with adman Hudson pretending to be a shy scientist in order to lead his competitor Day astray.

If you or yours insist on the kind of romance you watch with a box of Kleenex, there’s the classic Brief Encounter (Wednesday, 5am), with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard suffering as only the British can as married strangers who fall in love. And from 1939, Love Affair (Thursday, 7:30am) is the original version of the story remade as An Affair to Remember and much later as Sleepless in Seattle, though in this opinion they got it right the first time.

If you can’t record movies in advance, make it an early date on Thursday evening at 6pm for Kiss Me Kate, with Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel as divorced performers appearing in a musical adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew. But be forewarned that the programmers at TCM pulled a fast one later in the evening: There may be couples whose idea of the ideal Valentine’s Day date is watching Barbara Streisand in Hello, Dolly! (8pm), but surely there can’t be many of them, can there? On the other hand, it has to be a better night than going out to see Fool’s Gold.