I Do and I Don't

From one of our leading film historians and interpreters: a brilliantly researched, irresistibly witty, delightfully illustrated examination of "the marriage movie": what it is (or isn't) and what it has to tell us about the movies--and ourselves.As long as there have been feature movies there have been marriage movies, and yet Hollywood has always been cautious about how to label them--perhaps because unlike any other genre of film, the marriage movie resonates directly with the experience of almost every adult coming to see it. Here is "happily ever after"--except when things aren't happy, and when "ever after" is abruptly terminated by divorce, tragedy . . . or even murder. With her large-hearted understanding of how movies--and audiences--work, Basinger traces the many ways Hollywood has tussled with this tricky subject, explicating the relationships of countless marriages from Blondie and Dagwood to the heartrending couple in the Iranian A Separation, from...