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Sydney Morning Herald
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
A deep dive into romcoms, from 1930s screwball comedies to today
CINEMA Falling in Love at the Movies Esther Zuckerman Running Press, $42.99 There are some who seem unaware that romantic comedies were born long before Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks got together – with some help from writer-director Nora Ephron – for Sleepless in Seattle in 1993 and then You've Got Mail five years later. And even long before the 1980s, which gave rise to films such as Splash (1984), Say Anything… and When Harry Met Sally (both 1989) and when the 'chick flicks' label was yet to enter the popular lexicon. Most of the culprits can be found pounding away in the blogosphere, but some have managed to migrate into the mainstream with their blissful ignorance intact. Fortunately, however, Esther Zuckerman isn't one of them. A Millennial, she saw the light, as she explains in the introduction to her Falling in Love at the Movies, at the age of eight when her family took her to see You've Got Mail on New York's Upper West Side. It was love at first sight, but, since then, she's opened her lens wide enough to recognise that romcoms – as we now affectionately know them – have an illustrious history. As the subtitle for her handsomely illustrated book indicates, it's an overview of the genre, more or less beginning with the golden era of the screwball comedy – which includes 1930s films such as My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby, as well as His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire from the 1940s – and generally tracing its development through to the present day. She's not as knowledgeable about romcoms as, say, Molly Haskell in her seminal 1974 book, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Stanley Cavell in his brilliant Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), or Ed Sikov in his astute Screwball: Hollywood's Madcap Romantic Comedies (1989), although she cites them all (along with numerous magazine and newspaper articles). But she's a smart, thoughtful and often-perceptive enthusiast, concerned to make us understand that romcoms aren't just the equivalent of comfort food for needy filmgoers. She proposes connections between the old and the new. Some of them are irrefutable, like the fact that You've Got Mail is an updated remake of Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), with Hanks in the James Stewart role and Ryan in Margaret Sullavan's. Others grow evocatively but not especially persuasively out of her analyses, such as her identification of similarities between the flavour of Lubitsch's work and Nancy Meyers' in films such as What Women Want (2000) and It's Complicated (2009): 'Nancy, like Ernst, relishes art direction, the sparkling spaces that her characters occupy.' More successful but still not entirely convincing is her linking of Preston Sturges' wonderfully wacky 1940s comedies, such as The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story, and Ephron's equally wordy ones, beginning with the sparkling screenplay for When Harry Met Sally… She draws our attention to the plot details that drive romcoms. There's the 'meet-cute' that brings the lovers-to-be together for the first time, followed by the deceptions and/or misunderstandings that threaten their relationships, even if they're all eventually set aside for the unambiguous happy ending (Zuckerman allowing for exceptions, such as The Graduate and Annie Hall).
The Age
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
A deep dive into romcoms, from 1930s screwball comedies to today
CINEMA Falling in Love at the Movies Esther Zuckerman Running Press, $42.99 There are some who seem unaware that romantic comedies were born long before Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks got together – with some help from writer-director Nora Ephron – for Sleepless in Seattle in 1993 and then You've Got Mail five years later. And even long before the 1980s, which gave rise to films such as Splash (1984), Say Anything… and When Harry Met Sally (both 1989) and when the 'chick flicks' label was yet to enter the popular lexicon. Most of the culprits can be found pounding away in the blogosphere, but some have managed to migrate into the mainstream with their blissful ignorance intact. Fortunately, however, Esther Zuckerman isn't one of them. A Millennial, she saw the light, as she explains in the introduction to her Falling in Love at the Movies, at the age of eight when her family took her to see You've Got Mail on New York's Upper West Side. It was love at first sight, but, since then, she's opened her lens wide enough to recognise that romcoms – as we now affectionately know them – have an illustrious history. As the subtitle for her handsomely illustrated book indicates, it's an overview of the genre, more or less beginning with the golden era of the screwball comedy – which includes 1930s films such as My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby, as well as His Girl Friday, The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire from the 1940s – and generally tracing its development through to the present day. She's not as knowledgeable about romcoms as, say, Molly Haskell in her seminal 1974 book, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, Stanley Cavell in his brilliant Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), or Ed Sikov in his astute Screwball: Hollywood's Madcap Romantic Comedies (1989), although she cites them all (along with numerous magazine and newspaper articles). But she's a smart, thoughtful and often-perceptive enthusiast, concerned to make us understand that romcoms aren't just the equivalent of comfort food for needy filmgoers. She proposes connections between the old and the new. Some of them are irrefutable, like the fact that You've Got Mail is an updated remake of Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner (1940), with Hanks in the James Stewart role and Ryan in Margaret Sullavan's. Others grow evocatively but not especially persuasively out of her analyses, such as her identification of similarities between the flavour of Lubitsch's work and Nancy Meyers' in films such as What Women Want (2000) and It's Complicated (2009): 'Nancy, like Ernst, relishes art direction, the sparkling spaces that her characters occupy.' More successful but still not entirely convincing is her linking of Preston Sturges' wonderfully wacky 1940s comedies, such as The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story, and Ephron's equally wordy ones, beginning with the sparkling screenplay for When Harry Met Sally… She draws our attention to the plot details that drive romcoms. There's the 'meet-cute' that brings the lovers-to-be together for the first time, followed by the deceptions and/or misunderstandings that threaten their relationships, even if they're all eventually set aside for the unambiguous happy ending (Zuckerman allowing for exceptions, such as The Graduate and Annie Hall).
