I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies

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.