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Humour can be theorised as integral to the genre even if there are some films that do not provoke laughter. Romantic comedy has been described as a narrative of the heterosexual couple with a happy ending in which humour does not necessarily play an important part. The comic, protective, erotically-charged space is the space of romantic comedy. This book proposes a revised theory of romantic comedy and then tests its validity through the analysis of texts, but these films must not be expected to fully embody the theory. It proposes a change of approach in two different but closely linked directions. On the one hand, a comic perspective is a fundamental ingredient of what we understand by romantic comedy; on the other, the genre does not have a specific ideology but, more broadly, it deals with the themes of love and romance, intimacy and friendship, sexual choice and orientation. The book discusses two films directed by two of the most prestigious figures in the history of Hollywood comedy: Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Lubitsch's
relationship with her husband which is based on a series of well-rehearsed but flexible performances, and an understanding that her desire must not be impaired. II. Romantic comedy in no man’s land: Kiss Me, Stupid To Be or Not to Be is important from the perspective of romantic comedy because of the liminal position it occupies between two moments of the genre’s Hollywood history. Kiss
In a key scene from Robert Aldrich’s 1955 American science-fiction drama Kiss Me Deadly , right before the grand finale, the private detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) breaks into a commercial art gallery, the fictional Mist’s Gallery of Modern Art in Los Angeles. He is looking for information about a complicated case involving multiple
chips, rugby league and kiss-me-quick hats.8 Northern soul has its own heroes, villains and martyrs. For every superstar DJ in the 1970s there were dozens of others whose playlists and expertise extended no further than the bedroom, youth club or community centre. For every dancer who graced the floors of the Torch, Blackpool Mecca and Wigan Casino there were thousands more who never got beyond the miners’ institute or the local British Legion. But all played a role in sustaining the scene in the 1970s. The 276 CATTERALL 9780719097102 PRINT.indd 276 07/07/2020 08
subtle references to the Nivea brand, specifically the blue and white beach balls, and to Blackpool tourism, such as the inclusion of Blackpool Tower and a ‘Kiss me quick’ souvenir hat. The phrase ‘Kiss me quick’ is here cleverly employed both as a nostalgic signifier (of a bygone era of kitsch beach culture so strongly tied to Blackpool’s history) and as another instruction, to literally make contact with the sun briefly (becoming
novelist. And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we live in. There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad poems – I am deliberately choosing diverse ones – are ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, ‘When all the World is Young, Lad’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Bret Harte’s ‘Dickens in Camp’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’, ‘Keith of Ravelston’, ‘Casabianca
suddenly one day your suitcases would be standing downstairs and you’d be talking on the phone in a foreign language. I used to go into the nursery and pray to God something would happen to stop you from going, that Grandma would die or that there’d be an earthquake or that all the airplanes would have engine trouble. But you always went. All the doors were open and the wind blew through the house and everyone talked at once, and you came up to me and put your arms around me and kissed me and hugged
kissed me?” He turned very pale. “I dare not,” he said. “It’s somehow part of the remembering.” She lifted her lips till they all but met his. He sprang up with a little cry. “And yet you do love me, I know it, Miles. Oh, well, I shall bide my time.” “Yes, I love you, – at least this Miles loves you – the other –” “What other?” she demanded. “What other?” he repeated it rather stupidly. “Yes, that’s the point, Mary, what other?” She sighed. “You’re madder than usual tonight. How I wish I’d never met you!” “Oh no – not that, Mary!” “Yes, just that, Miles. You’re killing
adaptation could have a significant afterlife. Cole Porter’s musical Kiss Me, Kate first played on Broadway in 1948 and ran in different theatres for over 1,000 performances from the 1970s until the twenty-first century. The original 1948 Broadway stage version was filmed in 1953 and later in television adaptations. Picking up the pun used in a nineteenth-century stage performance by J. A. Sterry
Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur chapters propose a different point of entry into the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.