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Post by Mrs Vindecco on Aug 10, 2012 8:50:44 GMT
What makes a film from the classic period (20's- 50's) into a romantic film? Most genres will have an element of romance in them, but what makes a film go from drama to romance? I suppose it's when characters are purely motivated (perhaps unrealistically) by romantic love.
Cinema aficionados tends to dismiss this genre as sentimental or trite, but is that a fair assumption? Are there some worthy romantic films out there that are overlooked?
Or on the flip side, do you think there are some films that are unfairly pigeonholed into the Romance category?
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Post by woofy on Aug 10, 2012 17:49:04 GMT
Don't ignore the gender gap here. The classically defined "romantic film" seems to be targeted to a female audience (certainly the Sirk and Ray movies in the 50s). And, imho, the more the movie strays from the strictly romantic angle, the more appealing it is to a male audience. BTW, the same can be said of so-called romance novels. What % of their readership is male? I suspect it's a very small number and for the same reason.
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Post by Mrs Vindecco on Sept 1, 2012 15:53:58 GMT
When you talk about the films of Sirk, the generation gap certainly comes into play here. Women of a certain age in the 1950's may have lapped up all those melodramas, but I have a problem keeping my face straight throughout those films. Even at the time, I'm not sure how seriously actors took them. I remember when Lauren Bacall was interviewed by Mark Cousins and she could hardly keep a straight face while looking at clips from Written in the Wind . Apparently Bogart couldn't believe she was making one of those "soap operas".
Having said all that Sirk films are pretty to look at.
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Post by woofy on Sept 1, 2012 20:24:39 GMT
The 50s were a transitional period for films. There had been a cooperative arrangement between the film and radio industries in the 30s and 40s, but the 50s was the first time the movie industry ever had to compete with the elephant in the corner, television. To lure the couch potatoes away from their TV sets, everything about films had to be bigger and more dramatic. The 50s became the decade of "over abundance" in film history. But it was a losing battle all the same. Television was just too strong. By the early 60s the studio system, as it had been known, was a thing of the past. The studios were swallowed up by large conglomerates, mega-corporations that were often based in foreign countries. I guess you could say that the 50s represented "the last hurrah" of a dying art form.
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