Quotes from Jeanine Basinger

Movies with interfering in-laws and kids are often presented as comic, the ridicule bringing welcome relief to beleaguered married folks suffering offscreen at the hands of relatives.

The story of a marriage was an excellent way to fulfill the goal of discussing class without discussing class, and to tell an audience that they were upwardly mobile.

Everyone will tell you how rigid I am, but a teacher has to be flexible. You can't cut the student to your cloth you have to cut yourself to theirs.

Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half.

I am always astonished at how so much writing about old movies assumes that the audience believed everything in them. Of course we didn't. We entered into the joyful conspiracy of moviegoing.

KING VIDOR: When sound first came in, that's when popcorn and all the drinks started and necking in the theater started, because you could turn away and do all sort of things and you could still hear. You wouldn't miss anything, you know. The sound would take care of it. In silent pictures, you had to pay attention the whole time. You had to sit there and try to figure it out.

Thus jewelry in a woman's film means beauty, power, nobility, or evil, depending on the situation. The evil woman covets jewelry. A good woman does not really want it, just as she is not supposed to want economic power; that is why, in many films, she returns it to her man in his hour of need.

and Boyer has to be on the Jack Nicholson end of the old routine in which he tries to order a slice of cheese that comes only with the apple pie. (Why did no one mention that Five Easy Pieces [1970], with its "hold the chicken salad, just give me the toast" routine, was recycling old-movie dialogue that had appeared in many films?)

Politics is just love, sex, food, clothes, money, and correct society in a different form.

In-laws were often used as plot devices to drive a happy couple apart, to destroy marital love and trust.

Movies with interfering in-laws and kids are often presented as comic, the ridicule bringing welcome relief to beleaguered married folks suffering offscreen at the hands of relatives.

Movies endorsed unwanted ideas by putting them into story form and resolving them up there on the screen. The goal was, as always, identification, but also relief.

The true marriage movie involving in-laws and children is a story about how marriage is directly affected by external characters who impact the central relationship in various ways.

The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values.

The story of a marriage was an excellent way to fulfill the goal of discussing class without discussing class, and to tell an audience that they were upwardly mobile.

this film taps perfectly into the viewers' sense of the world. It was a big, big hit, and one of Hollywood's best-remembered marriage movies, although by grounding itself in trendy political issues, it avoids ordinary day-to-day marital problems. Its bottom line is, however, marry your own kind.

When it came to portraying couples who never directly connected, the Newmans were the Olympic gold champions

They could play married, both happy and unhappy, like no other acting couple have ever played married. They're the Lunts of the American marriage movie.

Excellent films do exist on the subject, however, and one is a pure marriage movie in which Newman and Woodward make it work. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge exists to tell moviegoers that the marriage of their parents—especially if they were those tragic dogsbodies, Midwesterners—were fogbound. The film depicts a steady relationship that has no real communication between its couple

Joanne Woodward's Mrs. Bridge is one of the best performances ever given on film of a middle-aged woman.

Another superb movie about a mature marriage grounded in a fundamental lack of communication is Dodsworth, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel.

Marriage," said Eddie Cantor, long wed to his Ida and the parent of five daughters, "is not a word. It's a sentence.

Loving and appreciative, researched to a fare-thee-well, and pitched to both fans and first-time viewers of Singin' in the Rain, this delightful book delivers almost as much fun as the film itself.

... in the movies Paris is designed as a backdrop for only three things--love, fashion shows, and revolution.