I Do and I Don't

December 15, 2012
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.

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February 15, 2013

Director Frank Capra once said, "Embrace happy marriage in real life, but keep away from it onscreen." Here Basinger (film studies, Wesleyan Univ.; The Star Machine) asks: What is a marriage movie, and how has its depiction evolved from silent cinema to the 21st century? She defines marriage movies as primarily focused on the couple's relationship, particularly the reasons why one marries, what makes a good partnership, and couples who do or don't work together. While they have over the years portrayed infidelity, addiction, even murder, studios have had to adjust to society's changing mores, production code censorship, and audience appetite for "star pairings." Basinger covers such diverse topics as screwball comedies, same-sex marriage, marriage on television, and nightmare visions of marital discord, such as in The War of the Roses. Some of the most perceptive treatments of marriage recently have come from abroad, notably the Oscar-winning 2011 Iranian film A Separation. VERDICT Basinger's thorough and lively popular history covers classics like Citizen Kane and Dodsworth while unearthing obscure and unjustly neglected films. This book is an excellent "viewer's advisory" to an often overlooked subject. Recommended.--Stephen Rees, formerly with Levittown Lib., PA

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2012
Film historian and biographer Basinger tackles a subject, marriage in the movies, that proved to be trickier than she'd suspected. Nailing down movies that are fundamentally about marriage, it turns out, is not that easy. The Thin Man, for example, is about a married couple, but it's not about marriage; on the other hand, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the Pitt-Jolie actioner, is, according to Basinger, one of the best and most original film commentaries on marriage ever made. The book is evenly divided between defining the marriage movie and exploring the evolution of Hollywood's handling of the theme: a movie like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), for example, with its frank discussions about sexuality and its daring-for-the-time intermingling of two married couples, probably couldn't have been made even a handful of years earlier. But, then, some of the earliest movies about marriage could be pretty daring, toowitness The Cheat, the story of a controlling husband and his unfaithful wife that was so popular it was made three times between 1915 and 1932. A thoughtful and insightful examination of one of film's most popular themes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)