September 2006

Talking About Movies: Mixed Genres

By Frank Beaver

Sometimes movies that click with audiences and generate unusual box-office revenue do so because their scripts draw on elements from different kinds of genre films and combine them in innovative ways. This type of film can also become one that points Hollywood in new directions.

Take for example Breaking Away (1979). Steve Tesich's Oscar-winning screenplay starts out very much like one of those youth alienation films that had been popular on American screens since the mid-1950's, beginning with works like East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause (both 1955), and taking on new life in 1967 with The Graduate .

Breaking Away is set in Bloomington, Indiana, where four college-age "townies" are depicted as listless, unmotivated, and confused about the future. Their parents don't understand them, especially the bewildered father of one of the boys who has adopted in his life all things "Italian."  

It turns out that the lad, Dave (Dennis Christopher), has a dream of becoming a champion Italian bicyclist. This dream leads him to enter the "Little 500" bike race held annually in Bloomington. The race, pitting "townies" against "gownies," serves as the climax to a film, and transforms it from an alienated-teen flick to one that has more in common with the thrilling heroics of uplifting sports-oriented movies which had been spawned by Rocky in 1976.

Breaking Away concludes with heartwarming reconciliations that push aside all generational issues and youth angst. This little-budget movie was a big hit with critics and audiences alike, and it clearly signaled the beginning of new approaches to the treatment of family relationships on the screen and how they are resolved. When the film opened in Ann Arbor, I saw it at an afternoon matinee, and that night I went back for a second viewing, taking along with me my 15-year old son.

In a similar cross-genre way, An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) did for the screen romance what Breaking Away had done for youth films. Feel-good adult romances had suffered a setback in the 1970s when films like Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) came under attack by some women's groups for their "Independent-Woman-Finds-Mr. Right" endings. (Alice—Ellen Burstyn—a recent widow, had intended to journey on to California and restart her abandoned singing career, but instead at film's end succumbs to the amorous urgings of a good-looking rancher, Kris Kristofferson).

For nearly a decade screenwriters shied away from stories where girl walks off into the sunset with boy. This was especially so in films where the female protagonist had been carving out a career for herself, independent of men. A good example was An Unmarried Woman (1978). The woman of the title (Jill Clayburgh) finds work in an art gallery after being abruptly divorced by her husband. Potential suitors come and go, most notably an attractive, sensitive artist (Alan Bates). But in the end Clayburgh rejects any overtures for a committed relationship. (Though she does accept one of the artist's paintings as a token of his affection.)

The turn-around adult romance film An Officer and a Gentleman combined two classic movie formulas: the intense military training camp movie, and the romance between a man and woman of very different backgrounds and personalities. The navy cadet protagonist (Richard Gere) survives an uncompromisingly tough drill instructor (Louis Gossett, Jr.) to become a pilot and officer. Ordinarily, a training camp movie would then follow the hero off to war. Instead, our newly minted officer rushes in his navy whites to the woman (Debra Winger) he has reluctantly but slowly come to love. Dashing into the dreary factory where Winger works, Gere sweeps her into his arms and carries her away to be his "aviator wife," the role in life she had been seeking all along. The movie that started like a war story is transformed into a fairy tale ending, with Prince Charming now a navy aviator.

Roger Ebert called An Officer and a Gentleman "the best movie about love I've seen in a long time."  He was right and audiences felt the same way. The film earned a whopping $130 million in the U.S. alone. Most significantly it demonstrated to Hollywood that filmgoers liked movies where the guy and the girl get together in the end. American screens have been flooded with feel-good romances ever since.

A current film which I adore, Little Miss Sunshine, is such a delight partly because of how it co-opts all sorts of different genre elements and comic styles. It's foremost a spoof of contemporary American family life, combined with a satiric take on beauty pageants, while blending in black humor and Keystone Kops-like action sequences as the family tries to make its way to California in a VW bus with a busted clutch. The combination of diverse genre elements results in a film with non-stop plot twists and continuous hilarity.

I think Little Miss Sunshine is in its own quirky ways a landmark film because—to paraphrase Roger Ebert—it's the best comedy that I've seen in a long time.

Film historian and critic Frank Beaver is professor of film and video studies and professor of communication.