'Serenity'
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
It used to be that a gentleman never jilted a lady, period, end.
So in older movies, the gentleman hopes to annoy the lady so much that she will jilt him. This provides the romantic tension when he's in love with lady A but betrothed to lady B. See, for instance, Holiday, where Cary Grant is in love with Katherine Hepburn but betrothed to her bitchy older sister.
Man, I still need to see Holiday.
I need to see it too. I have a huge urge to see the entire jilting oeuvre, although I know most of it will make me scream.
Holiday. Sigh. Where's the friggin' DVD, I ask you?
It's not a true left-at-the-altar movie though, as Cary Grant and Bitchy Sister don't go as far as the wedding.
Now you're gonna get JZ all riled up about Holiday again, since it's one of her favorite movies and she can rhapsodize about it for a good five paragraphs without taking a breath.
I will simply opine (for the fifth time at least) that Kate/Cary totally trumps Kate/Spencer.
I will simply opine (for the fifth time at least) that Kate/Cary totally trumps Kate/Spencer.
Maybe there's a Kate/Spencer movie that can come close to either Holiday or The Philadelphia Story. If so, I haven't seen it.
::ahem::
::coughdesksetcough::
Fred Astaire can't jilt Betty Furness, his fiancee, in Swing Time, even though he is falling in love with Ginger Rogers. His friends conspire to set things up so that she'll jilt him; I think she dumps him at the altar.
I think guy-jilting-woman is actually much more interesting; it was understood that the woman could walk out any damned time she wanted to, for any reason, but that a man, having asked a woman to marry him, was not free to change his mind. That's part of why George Kittredge is a swine in The Philadelphia Story -- not only does he assume the worst of Katherine Hepburn, but he threatens to back out of the wedding.
I suppose The Graduate has to qualify as part of the jilting genre.
And, in an odd twist, Ben Affleck's character (cleverly named Ben), for the most part, jilts the woman he's just fallen in love with (Sandra Bullock, cleverly named Sarah) by actually going ahead and marrying his intended in Forces of Nature. Nobody saw that comin'.
I'm sincerely embarrassed that I must admit to sitting through that entire movie...and that I subsequently remember anything at all about it.