Using of the industry neologism to describe this film sounds a bit flippant, but I didn’t mean to suggest that it is a lesser film by lumping it in with a genre that may have fallen into disrepute.

For the record, I find the generic evolution of the romantic comedy fascinating. It’s most successful mannered phase, the “screwball farce” emerged quite suddenly, perhaps as a response to industry wide censorship and growing class consciousness in New Deal America. Unlike the baroqueness unleashed in the Western, Musical, family melodrama, or “psychological suspense film” in the 40s and 50s, the heightened mannerism of the studio style of the 40s and 50s dampened comedic depictions of heterosexual norms during the post war years. There have been some interesting dissections of the humor directed at romance over the years but any revival of the energy of the pre- WWII romantic comedy never really took hold.

See, I don’t like applying quality to the rubric of genre assignment. It’s like the horror versus thriller categories; if your horror movie is considered good, it gets to be called a thriller.

She had to choose between a great man who was not, so far as we could tell, a good husband, and a decent man who probably would not have made a good husband either. Not that we need this to tell us we are not in a romcom (though it’s both more romantic and funnier than most romcoms), but the complexities of the people in the triangle are far above what we see in romcoms.

Seems like an insult to call The Philadephia Story a romcom.

It’s not exactly that, but Casablanca?

Literally ctrl+F “baxter” as I was reading the article.

Interesting! I didn’t know any of that, but it seems like the sort of ground-rule understanding you’d want to have before you watched a bunch of romantic comedies, lest you go in assuming that what you’re about to see is meant to be somehow normative in any way, shape or form. Thanks for posting that.

Mahogany. She was single, dated Lando, then dated Norman Bates, then Daddy Warbucks, then finally returned to Lando.

The divorce/remarriage rom com formula of the 30s, dictated by the Hays code, pretty much enforced this code. See THE AWFUL TRUTH, THE PHILADELPHIA STORY and THE PALM BEACH STORY for examples.

Speaking of tAT, a special recognition should be given to Ralph Bellamy here, who played two of these unfortunate schlubs in tow of the most famous rom- coms of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

The Hollywood ideology after the production code dictated that the heterosexual coupling formula reconcile opposites. This has little to do with romance in real life, but in refashioning the idea of romantic love into a metaphor of social integration. In some regards, “the Baxter” feels like an accidental byproduct from an older romantic melodrama formula where infidelity was the primary problem. I don’t know this for a fact, but it seems right.