I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies
Film historian and biographer Basinger tackles a subject, marriage in the movies, that proved to be trickier than she’d suspected. Nailing down movies that are fundamentally about marriage, it turns out, is not that easy. The Thin Man, for example, is about a married couple, but it’s not about marriage; on the other hand, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the Pitt-Jolie actioner, is, according to Basinger, one of the best and most original film commentaries on marriage ever made. The book is evenly divided between defining the marriage movie and exploring the evolution of Hollywood’s handling of the theme: a movie like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), for example, with its frank discussions about sexuality and its daring-for-the-time intermingling of two married couples, probably couldn’t have been made even a handful of years earlier. But, then, some of the earliest movies about marriage could be pretty daring, too—witness The Cheat, the story of a controlling husband and his unfaithful wife that was so popular it was made three times between 1915 and 1932. A thoughtful and insightful examination of one of film’s most popular themes. --David Pitt