The Romantic Comedy & the Crime Drama Genres
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This paper examines two frequently used film genres, the romantic comedy and the crime drama, and compares and contrasts three films that combine these genres, using the elements of danger and criminal associations to heighten the romance of the story. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) sets its darkly comic plot in motion when two musicians witness the St. Valentine's Day massacre and flee from the killers in disguise, each finding a romantic partner in the process. George Armitage's Gross Pointe Blank (1997) sends a hit man to an unsettling reunion with his high school class and the high school sweetheart he abandoned at the prom. Martin Brest's Gigli (2003) tries to generate romantic sparks between two hired guns vying to impress their boss with their criminal skills. Each film uses classic elements of these two very different genres to explore the relationship between men and women, and each is very much the product of a particular point in social history. Together, these three movies try to put a very different spin on the archetypal "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" scenario. Most plays, novels, and other forms of fiction have always been possible to classify into genres. Wes D. Gehring writes: Genre is a French word for a literary type. In film study it represents the division of movies into groups which have similar subjects and/or themes . . . . Historically, genre lineage can be traced back to the seemingly always intellectual present Po
. . .
ements are set in motion when a pair of hapless musicians, played by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, witness to the brutal murder of seven gang members in a Chicago garage. Fleeing for their lives, they decide that the safest way to get out of town is in disguise, as members of an all-girl band bound for a gig in Florida.
Wilder's depiction of the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre recalls the classic gangster movies in the immediacy of its violence. He is able to start what becomes a comedy with this flash of realistic violence in part because of the time in which the film was made. Rafter notes that Some Like It Hot was made during the beginnings of relaxation of the film codes dictating what could be shown on film. "For the crime film, these changes meant shocking, highly psychological productions, replete with new kinds of killers, offenses, and motivations and a brasher display of screen violence" (27). The force of the shootings provides a powerful motive for the two men to escape. It places them in palpable danger in a way that drives the rest of the story and gives the romantic elements a strong source of theatrical conflict.
Romance blooms in the shape of the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Pointe Blank, Genres Gehring, Dolf Zillmann, Joe Brown, Scott Galupo, Andrew Sarris, Nicole Rafter, Poetics Aristotle, Stephen Powers, Day Massacre, romantic comedy, criminal element, boy girl, crime drama, pointe blank, boy meets girl, grosse pointe, crime films, boy meets, meets girl, film genres, grosse pointe blank, romantic comedy crime, meets girl boy, elements romantic comedy,
Approximate Word count = 3804
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
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