There are faint echoes of Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar trying to stimulate Tony Curtis’s Joe in Some Like It Hot, the difference being that the disguised Joe is feigning impotence as a seduction ploy. Edward appears to be genuinely scared of getting between the sheets with Vivian; the film might as well have been called Some Like It Cold. And it is this ingenious addition to Lawton’s screenplay which allows Pretty Woman to float like a champagne bubble up from the squalor of its opening scenes to the wish-fulfilment of its second act. It’s all right, Marshall is telling us. You don’t have to worry about anything as seedy as a rich man paying a poor girl for sex. Look! The guy doesn’t even want to have sex with her! Pretty Woman makes this clear. When Vivian does eventually get her hands on Edward, he responds with a sharp intake of breath and a pained, faraway look. Marshall then cuts to his hot post-coital shower, as if he and the viewer were washing away a shameful memory.

Happily ever after?

Set all that next to the previous year’s hit US rom-com, When Harry Met Sally, in which the characters breezily recount their intimate liaisons. Set it next to the erotic heat in any pairing of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, or Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Pretty Woman is positively prudish in comparison: a film about a sex worker which is primly censorious about casual sex. After dinner on their second evening together, Edward feels the “need to relax”, as his counterpart in 3,000 puts it. Vivian’s suggestion is that they “watch old movies all night”; Edward’s preferred alternative is to slope off to the hotel’s dining room and improvise moodily on the piano. By the third evening, the relationship seems to be warming up: Vivian is wearing nothing but a tie when Edward gets back from the office, and they retire to the penthouse’s boating pond-sized bath. Time for some smoky jazz saxophone and candle-lit canoodling? Well, no. Edward takes the opportunity to discuss the issues he had with his late father. Form a queue, ladies!