The Romantic Comedy and Crime Drama

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

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Category: Film - T