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

Cavell puts forward a category of films at the start of the Talkies called the "comedy of remarriage." These films would otherwise be placed in the broader genre of the screwball comedy. Cavell's goal in defining this genre is partly philosophical and political, and fans of "The World Viewed" will recognize further developments of his ideas.I think the films that he chose for the genre do not fit a neat mold (after all, "It Happened One Night" and "The Lady Eve" don't have couples that get "remarried"), but at least, they are titles that he genuinely loves, which is what makes the book so interesting.A good companion piece to this book is "In Praise of Love" by Alain Badiou.

It's a analysis book of several classic romantic comedies.

An important, well-written, and suggestive study.

Screwball Comedy is my favorite movie genre, and that is entirely because of this book.As a bonus, for some reason this book is #1 in Books > Textbooks > Engineering > Mechanical Engineering! Seriously! So read this book, watch The Lady Eve, and construct a bridge!

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.

I looked forward to reading this book because it covers a high point of romantic comedy. But the text obfuscates the subject with its pseudo philosophical interpretations. You will learn barely nothing from Cavell's study of some great films.