A fascinating, fact-filled story of marriage and the movies.
Exhaustive, entertaining take on how the silver screen has portrayed wedded bliss and wedded misery.
Marriage was a problem for Hollywood and its main business of putting people in theater seats. True, it was familiar to the audience, but familiarity is not entertainment and escape. So Hollywood had the task of making the mundane exotic while still reassuring the audience that marriage was a good thing. The marriage film “had to become negative about itself in a positive way,” writes noted film historian Basinger (Film Studies/Wesleyan Univ.; The Star Machine, 2009, etc.). Sin and tragedy might occur, but in the end, marriage would endure. With prose both light and irreverent—an irreverence often aimed at the ham-handed plot manipulations the genre would at times use—the author traces how filmmakers tried to achieve these dual purposes. With detailed synopses of films both great and not-so-great—from Gaslight and Adam’s Rib to the Ma and Pa Kettle series—Basinger shows how a small number of plot devices or problems could be endlessly redesigned, reinvented and redeployed to both entertain and reassure. These problems might be realistic—money (too much or too little), infidelity, in-laws, incompatibility, class—or more far-fetched—addiction and murder (“When you marry a murderer, your marriage is in trouble”), but every marriage movie would have at least one of them. The main pleasure here is Basinger’s explication of how the movies and stars of the studio system years made all this work. She also touches on how television took over the marriage story via the sitcom and how today’s marriage films deny the closure and reassurance of their predecessors.
A fascinating, fact-filled story of marriage and the movies.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-26916-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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