Cinematic spark

When makes some movie couplings sizzle while others merely fizzle out? It's more than just "a couple of faces seeming to fit like adjoining pieces in a jigsaw puzzle," says David Thomson. And there seem to be fewer chemically charged couples today than there were in the past.

Many young stars are more comfortable holding the screen on their own than really engaging with other people - I'd put Matt Damon, Jude Law and Tom Cruise in that category, and in part it's because they've never had the training in playing extensive, witty dialogue scenes. Why? Because few people write those scenes any more. Yet history suggests that they are vital to chemistry. In their two great films, the one thing Bogart and Bacall were allowed by censorship was to talk together in a vaguely dirty way. The same thing happened with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North By Northwest. She was not famous as a sexpot, but when her candid offer (of herself) took his breath away, they were into a prolonged kissing scene to rival Hitch's earlier masterpiece Notorious.