For many pop-culture websites, which we will not name here, the history of cinema apparently begins somewhere around the release of “Star Wars” (1977), with almost everything that preceded it to the big screen being sloughed off as quaint, forgettable and irrelevant.
It’s the sort of thing that people who love movies and movie history can often ignore with the roll of an eye, but when one site recently trumpeted its list of the 50 Best Rom-Coms of All Time — which featured exactly one movie made before 1980 and zero prior to 1970 — we could sit by no longer. (Audiences laughed and fell in love even before Meg Ryan was even born, if you can believe it.)
Here is an alphabetical list of 50 classic romantic comedies that merely scratches the surface of great movies made during ye olden times of 1979 and earlier: