ructures provide ôthe repetitive reaffirmation of certain ritualistic experiences, such as good triumphing over evil, the promise of finding the perfect love, the comic underdog winning - things which do not occur so frequently, if at all, in real lifeö (2), and thus give audiences reassurance about the way the world can work and their place within it in the context of a familiar story structure.
Films quickly adopted traditional storytelling archetypes to give their audiences narrative threads that matched those found in plays and novels, and added their own touches through the aesthetic made possible by a visual, moving image. In his Handbook of American Film Genres, Gehring lists and examines some of the major film genres: adventure, Westerns, gangster films, film noir, combat films, screwball comedies, populist comedies, parody, black humor, clown comedy, horror films, science fiction, and fantasy. Genres can be grouped in different ways, according to shared elements or approaches, and the three films on which this paper focuses share two quite different common story elements.
The first is romance. One of the most basic storytelling plots, these stories focus on two people who meet, fall in love, face obstacles, and overcome them, ending up together or separated forever by fate and circumstance. When the story ends with the lovers united (or, more often, reunited after facing down the challenges that conspire to keep them apart), the result is a romantic comedy, a happy coming together of two people who, in the course of the story, find themselves to be kindred spirits. This essential story outline has formed the basis of countless popular entertainments. One of the first motion pictures ever filmed, before movies learned to tell stories, was, nevertheless, a nascent romance, titillating audiences with its kinescope record of a couple kissing. To modern audiences, the affectionate exchange is modest, shy, and chaste...