Something wonderful happened to the movies in the 1930s with the arrival of the romantic comedy, a uniquely American film form that has been delighting audiences ever since. At once innocent and worldly, giddy and glamorous, the genre has employed some of Hollywood's most sparkling talent. TCM's tribute to this enduring form runs 24 hours, two days a week, and encompasses seven decades of love and laughter.

Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) launched the genre known as "screwball comedy," sweeping the Academy Awards® and captivating Depression-era audiences with its irreverent and offhand, yet oh-so-romantic, approach. There was something new and radical in the bantering of Claudette Colbert as the runaway heiress and Clark Gable as the no-nonsense reporter who reins her in. Carrying on the tradition of sharp repartee in Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve (1941) is another pair of exquisitely matched costars, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. Stanwyck plays a cardsharp who fleeces nerdy millionaire Fonda-only, of course, to fall in love with him.

A newly sleek Doris Day reinvented her screen image and created a vogue for sophisticated sex satires with Pillow Talk (1959), in which she and a wolfish Rock Hudson share a party line and double entendres considered risque for their time. Among Day's saucy follow-ups was That Touch of Mink (1962), in which her sparring partner was the quintessential leading man of romantic comedy, Cary Grant. Like many another film of its type, this one features an outstanding supporting cast of eccentrics-Gig Young, Audrey Meadows, John Astin, Richard Deacon, even baseball great Yogi Berra!

Marsha Mason and an Oscar®-winning Richard Dreyfuss bring that elusive quality known as romantic chemistry to The Goodbye Girl (1977), Neil Simon's bittersweet love story about a dumped-upon divorcee who is forced to share her apartment with a scruffy actor. Cher hit the peak of her movie career, and also took home an Oscar®, for Moonstruck (1987), in which she plays a widowed Brooklyn bookkeeper opposite Nicolas Cage as the smitten bakery operator who ignores her command to "snap out of it!"

A comedy of manners flavored with romance, Sense and Sensibility (1995, TCM premiere) brought an Oscar® to Emma Thompson for her adaptation of Jane Austen's classic 1811 novel. Thompson also stars as Austen heroine Elinor Dashwood, who must cope with not only her own romantic problems but those of her impetuous sister Marianne (Kate Winslet). For all its period trappings, the tale is given a distinctly contemporary feel by Thompson and company.