In the 1989 film When Harry Met Sally, written by the late Nora Ephron, two platonic friends, Harry and Sally discuss love, sex, marriage in an isolating New York city, while time moves on to the rhythm of “Will they? Won’t they?” Afterwards the romantic comedy died a long, slow death. Throttled by the apparent preference for sex over the erotic pleasure of delayed gratification.

Now, in the film What If, previously known as The F Word (F for Friendship) - opening this week in the US and already being called When Harry Potter met Sally - Daniel Radcliffe stars with Zoe Kazan in an attempt to revive the rom-com genre by asking, can friends become lovers? (Making a change from can lovers become friends?) The film might just have caught a change of mood – perhaps the pornographically driven pulse that rules the cinema is beginning to slow and Cupid’s arrow is heading for the public heart all over again?

Rom coms have faced a series of flops. In the American mould, they all seem to star overweight men acting like juvenile delinquents with narcissistic personality complex. It is 20 years since the sickly sweet Four Weddings and a Funeral while, according to The Times, of the 100 highest earning films of this year only three have been romantic comedies. Amy Nicholson, a film writer for LA Weekly magazine is quoted as saying: “In today’s comedies [men and women] are either casually hooking up or already married. These are comedies of exasperation not infatuation.”

In the book Script Girls, Lizzie Francke describes how the tiny number of female scriptwriters in Hollywood, what Ephron called “a very male town” have battled since the 1920s to bring another dimension to the big screen – a sometimes unashamedly soppy dimension. Callie Khouri’s Thelma and Louise (1991) for instance. “I was fed up with the passive role of women,” she explained. “They were never driving the story because they were never driving the car.”

In Sleepless in Seattle (1993) Ephron again underlined some of the difference between the films of boys and girls. Annie falls in love long distance with Sam whom she doesn’t meet until the final five minutes of the film and - without so much as a flicker of carnal knowledge - it all ends happily ever after. Annie’s favourite film is An Affair to Remember (1957) in which two estranged lovers arrange to meet at the top of the Empire State Building.

“That’s a chick’s movie,” says one of Sam’s male friends. The men prefer The Dirty Dozen. (That said a handful of women scriptwriters have written films in which the gender of the author is hard to detect. Play Misty For Me written by Jo Heims and Leigh Brackett who wrote The Big Sleep to name but two. )

Now we are told we live in an era of metrosexuality – even heterosexual men are allowed to emote, wax and spend a long time getting dressed; while women can be steely, non-maternal and sexually rapacious - but both might just have lost their appetite for sexual gymnastics (goodbye Fifty Shades of cinematic Grey). We always want what we can’t have. Sex is apparently readily available on tap with an app, a soul mate for life, or at least for a decade or two, is so much harder to find. In the past, the search for Mr and Ms Right, against the odds, overcoming all challenges, while remaining steadfastly clothed, relatively chaste and upright, has engaged the senses for millions sitting in the dark for 120 minutes. Perhaps, its time has come again.

So, where are the contemporary Cary Grants when you need them most? Mr Clooney can’t do it all.

• What’s your favourite rom-com of all time? Perhaps you simply hate them all ... Either way, have your say below