Jeanine Basinger Quotes & Sayings

In Beautiful, Mr. Shearer writes with humor and has fun with some of the glorious nonsense of Lamarr's movies. — Jeanine Basinger

They could play married, both happy and unhappy, like no other acting couple have ever played married. They're the Lunts of the American marriage movie. — Jeanine Basinger

When Clark Gable, MGM's most popular and famous leading man asked for a percentage of the profits from his films, he was flatly refused. A top executive was reported to have said, He's nobody. We took him from nobody. We lavished him with lessons and publicity and now he's the most desired man in the world. Who taught him how to walk? We straightened his teeth and capped them into that smile. We taught this dumb cluck how to depict great emotions, and now he wants a piece of the action? Never! — Jeanine Basinger

Excellent films do exist on the subject, however, and one is a pure marriage movie in which Newman and Woodward make it work. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge exists to tell moviegoers that the marriage of their parents - especially if they were those tragic dogsbodies, Midwesterners - were fogbound. The film depicts a steady relationship that has no real communication between its couple — Jeanine Basinger

In-laws were often used as plot devices to drive a happy couple apart, to destroy marital love and trust. — Jeanine Basinger

Movies endorsed unwanted ideas by putting them into story form and resolving them up there on the screen. The goal was, as always, identification, but also relief. — Jeanine Basinger

When it came to portraying couples who never directly connected, the Newmans were the Olympic gold champions — Jeanine Basinger

Another superb movie about a mature marriage grounded in a fundamental lack of communication is Dodsworth, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel. — Jeanine Basinger

Movies with interfering in-laws and kids are often presented as comic, the ridicule bringing welcome relief to beleaguered married folks suffering offscreen at the hands of relatives. — Jeanine Basinger

Everyone will tell you how rigid I am, but a teacher has to be flexible. You can't cut the student to your cloth; you have to cut yourself to theirs. — Jeanine Basinger

Magic in cinema is a bit like ventriloquism on the radio. — Jeanine Basinger

Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half. — Jeanine Basinger

... this film taps perfectly into the viewers' sense of the world. It was a big, big hit, and one of Hollywood's best-remembered marriage movies, although by grounding itself in trendy political issues, it avoids ordinary day-to-day marital problems. Its bottom line is, however, marry your own kind. — Jeanine Basinger

Loving and appreciative, researched to a fare-thee-well, and pitched to both fans and first-time viewers of Singin' in the Rain, this delightful book delivers almost as much fun as the film itself. — Jeanine Basinger

The business didn't trust it, audiences didn't want it, but marriage could never be ignored. It was everywhere and nowhere, the genre that dared not speak its name, the ghost that hung over the happy ending of every romantic comedy. As a subject, it existed to be achieved (jolly comedy, great love story), destroyed (death, murder, tragedy), or denied (divorce). If it was achieved, the movie was over. If it was destroyed, it was no longer there, gotten rid of and abandoned once and for all. If it was denied, it was only temporarily shelved (for some fun) and could be reassuringly restored. — Jeanine Basinger

The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values. — Jeanine Basinger

The story of a marriage was an excellent way to fulfill the goal of discussing class without discussing class, and to tell an audience that they were upwardly mobile. — Jeanine Basinger

Marriage, after all, was the known, not the unknown: the dull dinner party, not the madcap masquerade. It was a set of issues and events that audiences knew all too well offscreen. Unlike the wide-open frontier of the western, offering freedom and adventure, or the lyrical musical, with its fantasy of release through singing and dancing, or the woman's film, with its placing of a marginalized social figure (the woman) at the center of the universe, or the gangster movie, with its violent excitement and obvious sexual freedom, the marriage film had to reflect what moviegoers already had experienced: marriage, in all its boredom and daily responsibilities. — Jeanine Basinger

Joanne Woodward's Mrs. Bridge is one of the best performances ever given on film of a middle-aged woman. — Jeanine Basinger

The true marriage movie involving in-laws and children is a story about how marriage is directly affected by external characters who impact the central relationship in various ways. — Jeanine Basinger

Why would everyone - in both the movie business and the audience - want to avoid the label "marriage"? Marriage was presumably everybody's business. People were either born into one, born outside of one, living in one, living outside of one, trying to woo someone into one, divorced from one, trying to get divorced from one, reading about one, dreaming about one, or just observing one from afar. For most people, it would be the central event - the biggest decision - of their lives. Marriage was the poor man's trip to Paris and the shopgirl's final goal. At the very least, it was a common touchstone. Unlike a fantasy film or a sci-fi adventure, a marriage story didn't have to be explained or defined. Unlike a western or a gangster plot, it didn't have to find a connection to bring a jolt of emotional recognition to an audience. Marriage was out there, free to be used and presented to people who knew what the deal was. — Jeanine Basinger

In the movies Paris is designed as a backdrop for only three things
love, fashion shows, and revolution. — Jeanine Basinger

A small town is automatically a world of pretense. Since everyone knows everyone else's business, it becomes the job of the populace to act as if they don't know what is going on instead of its being their job to try to find out. — Jeanine Basinger