Customer Reviews

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Harvard Film Studies)

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Cavell identifies the "comedies of remarriage," those romantic comedies and comic romances that lit the screens and the hearts of the audiences of the 1930's and 40's. With the mind of a philosopher and scholar and the passionate appreciation of a true fan, he examines classic romantic comedies (and comic romances), including "The Lady Eve," "The Awful Truth," and "The Philadelphia Story." In a classical context (he compares the role of the woods in Shakespeare to the role of Connecticut in "Bringing Up Baby") he manages to illuminate the films without disturbing the gossamer that holds them together. The best that can be said is that he does justice to these lovely films, and makes us understand how smart we were to adore them

The goal of this book is to show that the classic American film comedies of the 30's and 40's are worthy of the best criticism. The author succeeds. If you love movies, and want to think about them seriously, this is your book. The films in it star Hepburn, Grant, Tracy, Gable, Stanwyck. This is a sophisticated book for a sophisticated film audience. The author is one of America's leading philosophers. Cavell brings his knowledge of concepts of friendship, conversation, gender, parenting, sexuality, fun, and adventure to bear on each of the romantic comedies he discusses. The genre explored here continues in GROUNDHOG DAY, FLIRTING WITH DISASTER, WHEN HARRY MET SALLY, SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, ALL OF ME, JOE VERSUS THE VOLCANO. This book is serious, and well worth it. It explores everything important to every romantic relationship. I highly recommend it to everyone.

This is an extraordinary book, with an extraordinary personality. Its subject is the Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, and it is first and foremost a serious work of film criticism, full of literary insight and philosophical speculation (the author is a well-known Harvard philosophy professor, now retired). But it is also full of fun. Laughter lurks everywhere, bubbling continually beneath the surface of the discourse, and Cavell's love of the films (and, not incidentally, his love of Irene Dunne and Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Rosalind Russell and Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert) is all but palpable. The result is a marriage of the serious and the playful that is, in my opinion, unique -- I know of no other work of literary or film criticism that so joyously celebrates its subject. In the years since the book was originally published in 1981, Cavell's phrase "comedy of remarriage" -- signifying a romance in which a made-for-each-other couple becomes estranged and then finds their way back to a deeper understanding of both themselves and their relationship -- has become standard filmcrit terminology. That's as it should be, because Cavell makes a brilliant case for his thesis, all the time (in a phrase from Emerson that serves as the book's epigraph) carrying the holiday in his eye. Bravo.

This book is not for filmgoers. Its focus is geared to the elite and erudite college student who will be impressed by name dropping of prominent philosophers in Western Lit. To be polite, it is dripping in stream-of-consciousness commentary that wreaks of self-indulgence, suggesting adult attention deficit problems. It is not uncommon to find sentences in excess of 50 words long, that if grammatically diagrammed would make Watson and Crick's double helix look like a straight arrow. Save time and save money. The clip art of movie scenes is primitive and should have been a clue as to the author's intent. A great disappointment.