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  • Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934–1965
  • Nicole Richter
Kathrina Glitre. Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934–1965.Manchester; New York: Manchester UP, 2006. 224 pages.

Kathrina Glitre's work is a critical examination of the contradictory and shifting representation of "the couple" in the Hollywood romantic comedy genre. Glitre's book is a desperately needed addition to the serious study of romantic comedy in the field of film studies that began with Stanley Cavell's groundbreaking work Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. The critical attention to this genre is severely lacking in comparison to the immense popularity that these films enjoyed and continue to enjoy. Glitre's book argues that genres change over time, and that in the instance of romantic comedy, there were three distinct cycles from 1934–1965. Glitre provides a chronology of these cycles: the screwball comedies of the 30s, which emphasize the theme of marriage; the career woman films of the 40s, which emphasize the theme of equality; and the sex comedies of the 50s, which address the theme of desire. Glitre argues that changes in the style and themes of the genre reflect the changing historical and ideological contexts from which these films emerge.

Glitre traces the emergence of the troubled married couple in Hollywood films of the 30s to a sense of crisis within American marriages, which found expression in declining birth rates and rising divorce rates. The legitimacy of marriage itself was being questioned by society, and this questioning gave rise to a set of films exploring this crisis of legitimacy, including The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, My Man Godfey, Libeled Lady, and Bringing Up Baby. Companionate marriage was being discussed as an alternative to patriarchical Victorian sensibilities, and the focus on raising a family and economic responsibility [End Page 1197] took a back seat to the friendship and mutual satisfaction between the couple. Comedies from this period imagined marriage as a sphere of leisure in which the pursuit of happiness was to be the goal.

Glitre claims that the marriages in this cycle challenge traditional conceptions of husband and wife, often through gender role reversal, in both personality characteristics and patterns of courting. These films also undermine conventional approaches to the "happy ending." The happy endings of these films don't imply a regressive politics because "the screwball comedy insists that the couple must keep on playing, keep on reinventing themselves, and keep on learning to love each other. The 'illusory eternity' of just living happily ever after is wholeheartedly demystified" (63). The onscreen and off-screen relationship of Myrna Loy and William Powell, as exemplified in The Thin Man films and Libeled Lady, embodies this new ethos of "making marriage fun."

Part III of the book, entitled "Equality," outlines a shift in the 1940s to a cycle of romantic comedies that focused on women in the workplace, deemed "career women films." Most critics have understood these films to be reactionary because the narrative usually ends with the woman renouncing her masculine traits and becoming more feminine. Glitre, however, argues for a rereading of the romantic comedy genre by acknowledging that at the level of plot these films may seem patriarchical but that the cultural and star discourses surrounding the films end up contradicting this stable reading. Glitre argues, "at the same time as insisting upon the 'naturalness' of conventional gender roles, the career woman comedy disrupts and even disproves the logic of gender essentialism" (91). In a detailed historical account of the cultural moment of the 1940s, Glitre reveals the way that debates about women's integration into the workplace centered on biological difference and that women's employment was sex-typed because of these differences.

Against the historical/cultural backdrop of sexual difference in the workplace, Glitre argues that a film like Adam's Rib, starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, stages a debate about equality in the face of sexual difference in the form of reciprocal game playing and performance. Hepburn and Tracy compete for power throughout the film because they are one another's equals. This competition supports Amanda's (Hepburn's) claim that their marriage is...

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