I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies
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From one of our leading film historians and interpreters: a brilliantly researched, irresistibly witty, delightfully illustrated examination of “the marriage movie”; what it is (or isn’t) and what it has to tell us about the movies—and ourselves. As long as there have been feature movies there have been marriage movies, and yet Hollywood has always been cautious about how to label them—perhaps because, unlike any other genre of film, the marriage movie resonates directly with the experience of almost every adult coming to see it. Here is “happily ever after”—except when things aren't happy, and when “ever after” is abruptly terminated by divorce, tragedy . . . or even murder. With her large-hearted understanding of how movies—and audiences—work, Jeanine Basinger traces the many ways Hollywood has tussled with this tricky subject, explicating the relationships of countless marriages from Blondie and Dagwood to the heartrending couple in the Iranian A Separation, from Tracy and Hepburn to Laurel and Hardy (a marriage if ever there was one) to Coach and his wife in Friday Night Lights. A treasure trove of insight and sympathy, illustrated with scores of wonderfully telling movie stills, posters, and ads.
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I loved Basinger's “The Star Machine,” but this book wasn't as gleeful a read.
The inevitable problem with a marriage-movie book is that it studies a pretty conventional subject. It doesn't have the verve of a book about B horror movies, say.
To make matters worse, the Hays code made it impossible for American movies to express anything irreverent or unconventional about marriage between 1934 to 1968. So a lot of the films that Basinger examines have a conservative and narrow worldview.
But with a subtitle like “A History of Marriage in the Movies,” why did she analyze TV shows? Couldn't she have cut 100 pages and eliminated the sections about “I Love Lucy” and “Friday Night Lights”? That would have pizazzed the book up a bit, and made me feel less like I was wading through a pool of easily digested mush.
Merged review:
I loved Basinger's “The Star Machine,” but this book wasn't as gleeful a read.
The inevitable problem with a marriage-movie book is that it studies a pretty conventional subject. It doesn't have the verve of a book about B horror movies, say.
To make matters worse, the Hays code made it impossible for American movies to express anything irreverent or unconventional about marriage between 1934 to 1968. So a lot of the films that Basinger examines have a conservative and narrow worldview.
But with a subtitle like “A History of Marriage in the Movies,” why did she analyze TV shows? Couldn't she have cut 100 pages and eliminated the sections about “I Love Lucy” and “Friday Night Lights”? That would have pizazzed the book up a bit, and made me feel less like I was wading through a pool of easily digested mush.
