The battle-of-the-sexes is one of the most familiar kinds of romantic comedies, from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, to Tracy and Hepburn locking horns, to Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner duking it in The War of the Roses.

It’s hard to put a fresh face on the genre, but Anne Fletcher, who directed the delightful 27 Dresses in Rhode Island a couple of summers ago, comes up roses with The Proposal. With a witty script by Peter Chiarelli, The Proposal is a daffy, breezy, laugh-out-loud comedy that sparkles with the perfect comic timing of Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Its oddball situations don’t hurt, either. Consider the scene in which Bullock, as pampered New York book editor Margaret Tate, tries to fight off a hungry eagle who wants to sink its talons into a fluffy little dog.

Bullock is the shrewish editor in chief of a big New York City publishing firm. When she arrives in the morning, all the office underlings go into lockdown. “It’s here!” they warn each other in inter-office e-mails.

When her put-upon assistant, Andrew Paxton (Reynolds), sees her in attack mode, he messages the rest of the office, “The witch is on her broom.” Demanding and humorless, she makes Andrew’s life a living hell, even refusing to allow him to go to his Grammie Annie’s 90th birthday party because she needs him for some weekend project.

Brash, brisk, callous and self-assured, Margaret is certain of her lofty place in the pecking order of New York’s publishing world.

But Margaret (don’t call her Meg!) is thrown for a loop when a U.S. Immigration officer arrives to deport her back to her native Canada because of a long-forgotten visa snafu.

Quick-thinking and trying to save her career, she announces, in front of the very surprised Andrew, that they are secretly engaged to be married. “Like it or not,” she tells the startled Andrew, “your wagon is hitched to mine,” assuring him that he will be fired otherwise. But the quick-thinking Andrew counter-blackmails, getting Margaret to promise that if their ruse works, he will be promoted and she will make sure that his manuscript is published. After all, there are risks. If the feds find out he’s lying — and the snoopy immigration official is determined to discover just that — Andrew can be fined $250,000 and sent to prison for five years.

What follows is an often hilarious charade in which Margaret and Andrew try to prove their “love” to the disbelieving immigration officer and to his family on a weekend trip to celebrate Grammie Annie’s 90th in Alaska.

It’s not easy. Margaret is a large round peg in a very small square hole of rally-round-the-family hug-me camaraderie. It’s all very alien to her.

With her tight-waisted outfits and high heels, she totters into this cheerful family mix where even Andrew’s old girlfriend, Gertrude (Malin Akerman of 27 Dresses), is affable. Mary Steenburgen, who plays Andrew’s mother, Grace, and Betty White, as Grammie Annie, welcome Margaret warmly. But Craig T. Nelson, as Andrew’s father, has heard his son’s disparaging remarks about his hateful boss and he can’t believe that his son has brought his “girl” home to meet the family.

An interesting touch is the very real friction that’s shown between father and son. The disapproving dad hopes his son will give up this literary nonsense and return to Alaska to enter the family business. Andrew’s announcement of the engagement ices up the situation further.

But even the engagement announcement is played for laughs as Margaret and Andrew, on the spot, come up with dueling ideas of how they fell in love while the family sits in rapt attention, ready to be mesmerized by the romance of it all. Behind the scenes, of course, Margaret and Andrew are usually spitting poison at each other. But in public, their pretend romance leads to zanily awkward moments, such as Grace’s insistence that her son and Margaret share a big bedroom. Behind closed doors they try to stay as far from one another as possible.

This leads to the scene in which they try to avoid seeing each other naked, something that ends in belly-laugh hilarity. The “almost-nude” sequence is one of the film’s funniest, as is Grace’s attempt to indoctrinate the reluctant Margaret into the girls-night-out “glitz” of Sitka night life, which involves an outrageous show featuring Oscar Nunez of TV’s The Office. The only off-key moment in the film is a very strange scene that involves the reliably humorous and outspoken Grammie Annie, here unexpectedly turned mystical.

Akerman seems wasted in an underwritten role, but there’s terrific ensemble work and support otherwise from Steenburgen, White, Nelson and Nunez. Bullock shows her flair for comedy as the fish-out-of-water Margaret who discovers that she needs something more than the satisfaction of a career. She and Reynolds, who always looks like a startled puppy trapped in this increasingly twisty tale, have good give-and-take chemistry that … well, you can imagine how that develops.

It all makes for a very cheerful stew and a lot of laughs.

****The Proposal

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Mary Steenburgen, Craig T. Nelson, Betty White, Malin Akerman, Oscar Nunez.

Rated: PG-13, contains brief nudity, profanity, adult themes.

mjanuson@projo.com