So this is a light-hearted romcom. Buttoned-up nerd Cary Grant (classic nerd) is set to be married to his cold and unloving assistant for some reason, but then encounters a truly dangerously deranged Katharine Hepburn, who lures him into a series of increasingly implausible escapades, featuring no fewer than two separate leopards, and they end up falling in love.

That the plot is implausible isn’t a criticism; in a comedy of this sort, it should be. The implausibility is a feature (and one that vitiates what would otherwise be criticism about unethical boundary-crossing, like when Hepburn deliberately traps Grant into staying with her by stealing his clothes — it’s a movie where she also steals a car on a whim and nobody really cares; just clearly it’s the sort of movie where treating anything in the movie as real-world behavior is a category error).

And as a bantering, slapsticky farce it works very well. Not every exchange works perfectly, and not every comedic setup lands the way it wants to, but plenty of them do, and even where the movie misses the mark, it still generally falls into “charming” as its failure mode.

I’m actually not sure why this is on the AFI list at all — it wasn’t huge in 1938 when it was released, which most of the AFI movies are. I guess maybe because it’s grown in stature since, because both Hepburn and Grant seem like they should be on an AFI list, and because what the fuck, it’s 1938? But Grant and Hepburn both appear on the list in 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, too, so one of those movies seems unnecessary.

But what the hell, I’d rather watch this than most of the movies on this list so far, so maybe let’s kick out a Marx Brothers thing or one of the dozens of interminable Vietnam movies before we get too fussy here. Recommended.