The characters act realistically based on their personalities, which are all unusual. The physical action is real so this scenario cannot be considered slapstick.
This comedy sub-genre is named after a baseball pitch, the screwball, which was perfected by baseball pitcher Carl Hubbell in the s. Screwball comedy only lasted from , when the Great Depression was in full swing, to , when World War II began. Screwball comedy was based on reverse class snobbery where it is more noble to be poor than rich.
The rich were portrayed as eccentric and wasteful fools. Romance is one of the key elements of screwball comedy. With the two classes of upper and lower or middle class working together, screwball comedies can be considered as recommending socialism.
The story is a little different, but overall, it can be considered within the realm of satire because the current society was being ridiculed. Any referral to a movie as a screwball comedy after is inaccurate, even if it is a re-make of a movie released during the period.
A re-make does not have the same relevancy, power, or passion as the original movie. A contemporary screwball-type comedy generally is fast paced with an eccentric character, but it does not have the class snobbery. Any class snobbery in the movie does not have the contemptable hatred toward the upper class as it did these movies during the Great Depression.
The emotional rage cannot be duplicated. However, the overriding story of the movie concerns reporters and editors doing anything in order to get the story. Comic romance is a big element in screwball comedy also, but other story lines are more dominant.
Can you think of a movie that has the primary story line as being a romantic relationship? If you can, how did you like the movie? Comedy is varied and complex. You can see how the stories, along with the personalities and actions of the characters, change, developing different sub-genres of the comedy being expressed. All comedy stems from either slapstick or satire. The first point is that every aspect of the crime genre is dramatic, so the elements are quite different than a comedy.
The setting for crime genre can be any location in the world and any year, because crime is something that has always existed in society. We will try to narrow this down for our example. The characters develop from the story and plot.
First situation: Jack is a nice, helpful individual at the beginning of the movie. He soon finds that he has to help a friend, Suzie, get out of a jam because she owes a lot of money to a gambling boss, Alec.
Alec laughs at him and is going to throw him out. Jack, even though he is a nice guy, has a very bad temper. This often is the situation in the crime genre.
Jack becomes extremely angry with Alec laughing at him, and he kills Alec. Suzie likes the new Jack and wants to be his girl. Suzie is aroused by the violence in Jack and cannot keep her hands off him. Jack soon becomes more successful than Alec ever was, but he begins to become too egotistical.
With his ego getting in the way, Jack makes a mistake when trying to take over a gambling casino. Jack is killed and the men kill Suzie.
The most jealous, vindictive, right-hand man in the gang takes over the gambling empire. Stories in the crime genre are often about people seeking power. Usually, the criminals want control over the city where the story takes place. Generally, they want to be in charge of the drug trade, gambling, liquor depending upon the year , or they want to rise up in the family or gang. Jack is a hardworking, honest detective.
He is dedicated to his job and his partner, Alec. Alec is murdered. During his investigation he meets Suzie. Suzie knew Alec and considered him a friend. Suzie asks if she can help with looking into the murder.
Jack, after some convincing, agrees. Suzie and Jack start to become close during the investigation, and Jack falls in love with her. This is often a foreshadowing as to how the story is going to end. After a few dead ends and blocked paths in the investigation, Jack picks up some information that leads him down an unsuspected path.
Jack finds that Suzie was a little more than a friend to Alec, so Suzie has an ulterior motive for assisting Jack. Jack discovers that Suzie murdered Alec and was going to kill Jack, too. These are the elements and formats of the crime genre. The crime can be different than murder. Crimes encompass a wide variety of different actions.
The main characters do not have to be crime bosses or police detectives, but they generally have a similar background. Very seldom do they lead a life like a factory worker or office employee.
This is one reason why the crime genre is so popular. People want to watch characters that lead exciting lives different from theirs. The stories in the crime genre are similar to the aforementioned two examples where the crime is more than a speeding ticket and provides an interesting and exciting story. The plot can be an inner conflict, once again, of the protagonist, and the setting is usually in the United States or Europe in modern times.
Because of the similarities between the Western and crime genres, I have included back-to-back discussions of the two genres. The setting provides the major difference between the crime genre and the Western genre. Instead of the characters and story occurring in the s or the s, the time for a Western is in the early to late 19th century or anytime through the s to s. Once the 20th century arrives, except for the beginning years, the feeling of the Old West is gone, which brings up the other aspect of the setting that defines the Western genre.
The Western genre takes place in the West. Depending upon the year, the West could be Ohio in the s, Missouri in the s, or Nevada in the s. The main character or protagonist is an individualist, who rides into town for a specific reason, or he may run into trouble while in town, or he may be hired to do something like blaze a trail West. The characters and the stories are straightforward. The interest is the developing story and the action-filled problems that the protagonist faces as he tries to accomplish what he set out to do.
The plot can still be one of inner conflict as the protagonist tries to accomplish the specific goal, quell the trouble in town, or overcome the obstacles of nature as the main character blazes the trail West. An example of the Western genre has Jack being the individualist, loner riding into town.
He has come to town to avenge the death of his partner. Outside of the setting, the same type of character and story could be used in the crime genre. While Jack begins to ask questions about what happened to his partner, he falls into the middle of a range war; a typical Western story, between two ranches over the grazing rights of land. Alec owns the one ranch, and Suzie a woman owns the other, which is a rarity in the West. Jack gets to know Suzie as his inquiries continue.
He begins a relationship with her. During the relationship, Jack gives Suzie a helping hand in the range war. Alec is totally evil, underhanded, and despicable in his actions.
Westerns, even more contemporary ones, have an outright bad person like Alec. You can see this in crime genre movies also. In the Old West, there can only be one climax to the story. Jack and Alec shoot it out; Alec is killed, and Jack and Suzie fall in love.
The war genre is straightforward because the movie is very limited in its parameters. The setting and the year is very specific regarding the year and the location. The locations would be an area where the war occurred or in the United States to concentrate on how the home front was coping.
The plot is the inner conflict with dealing with war. The characters and story are based on a battle, trying to obtain overall victory at some point of the war, dealing with losing, dealing with death, dealing with fighting, being a prisoner, or coping at the home front or a location where the fighting is not taking place.
World War II encompasses the war genre. Jack is a soldier, who is a married teacher with two children. Jack was told by his wife, Suzie, not to volunteer for any extra missions so he could come home alive to his family when the war is over. Of course, this is not going to be true because a war movie has to have a daring mission. After being in Europe for about a year and losing many battles, Jack becomes frustrated because he knows the war is not going to end soon.
Suzie dreads each day because of the emptiness in her life without Jack. To her, each day never appears to end. She is stressed because she has a continuous challenge to make ends meet.
Jack and seven other men are given a chance to go on a dangerous mission to blow up a German stronghold and capture a high-ranking German officer. These men are asked to go on this mission because of their intelligence and personalities. If they succeed in this mission, the war will likely be over quicker than expected, because of the information they will receive from this German officer. Jack remembers that his wife told him never to volunteer, but he knows he only has once choice.
He volunteers. Suzie gets a feeling of foreboding and is suddenly afraid something bad is going to happen. She starts to become distant to her friends and even her children. Jack goes on the mission. Everything is timed perfectly. The fortress is blown up and the German officer is captured. However, the trip back to the Allied lines did not go as planned. Half the men are killed, Jack is wounded, and the German officer is killed.
The Christmas holidays are near, and Suzie is persuaded to take the children to church. As the service begins, Jack walks into the church and joins Suzie and the children. The story ends happily, but with a cost. In order to give the story a more realistic feel, the protagonist is not totally successful with what he had set out to do.
The spy genre sounds like it could cross over to the previous genres already discussed. But only the setting and the plot can be standard. The setting could be the same as the war, Western, or crime genres, but it does not make it a war, Western, or crime genre. You have to remember that the story makes the genre because it controls everything else. In the spy genre, the main character generally works under an assumed identity in order to find something or destroy something of harm controlled by a nemesis.
As in past genres, the plot is the inner conflict of the protagonist. In this situation, he or she has a strong inner conflict to succeed at what he or she is assigned to act upon. Thus, if the movie has any of the aforementioned characteristics but takes place during World War II, the movie is primarily a spy movie rather than a war movie. Remember, the setting does not determine the genre but the story does. The story is interconnected to the characters and the plot.
The setting helps add the must-needed background and specificity to the movie, but it is not as interconnected as the other three genres. In recent times, a male of the strong virile type plays the protagonist spy. So, we will demonstrate that this does not always have to be that way in a movie. We will take a woman, named Suzie, who is the spy protagonist. We will set the example during World War II. Unlike Jack in the war genre discussion, Suzie is chosen because of her background in languages and her photographic memory, giving her the ability to memorize lists of facts immediately.
She is requested to go behind enemy lines as a civilian and obtain data that will debilitate the enemy thus giving the Allies the advantage and shortening the war by possibly years.
In order to be able to do this, and to prepare her mentally for the task, she is set to train for three weeks with an Army officer named Jack. Jack is very skeptical that Suzie will be able to pull the task off.
Jack states that it is not because she is a woman, but the movie viewers know that her being a woman is exactly the reason. Jack begins a rigorous training program just to say that he told her so. However, Suzie really masters everything Jack throws at her. After about a week, Jack sees this and starts to admire her strength and fortitude.
Jack makes the training less rigorous because he only trains her to get behind enemy lines, get back to the Allied lines, and how to mentally survive torture.
By the end of the three weeks, they begin to fall in love with each other, and Jack feels he should accompany her, but his command says that is impossible. The time has arrived for Suzie to go. The French underground has managed to get her a clerical job where she can do some travelling including going to Normandy. Rather abruptly, Suzie plans a trip to Normandy. She studies the land and is able to secretly catch a glimpse of German maps showing where their military strength is in and around Normandy.
Suzie rushes and gets the information off to the Allies before she is captured by the Germans. The Germans find her guilty of being a spy and she is executed. Can you see the difference between this example and the war genre example? Both have the same setting of World War II, but the spy genre example has a non-soldier searching for secret information, while the war genre had a group of soldiers going on a mission that was not secret.
The war mission was behind enemy lines and in the war zone where the fighting was occurring. The spy genre does not occur in the war zone where there was fighting. The spy story has a lot less emotion and love between the main characters. The spy story has more suspense as Suzie is hunting for information. She is becoming involved in several tight situations where she barely misses getting caught by the Nazis. The war genre story has the one climatic battle that the whole conflict was moving toward.
Most of the time these two genres do not become this similar but these two examples make it easier to see the differences in the two genres. Both the adventure and spy genres can have exotic settings. The stories are normally about a person or group of people searching for something.
During the journey of searching, dangerous situations are overcome by the main characters. The protagonist may end up getting involved in fighting to overcome social or moral injustices in the exotic location where he or she has journeyed.
The difference between this genre and the spy genre is, once again, the story. The spy genre has a story where something is searched for secretively, and the information itself contains secret information. This story has suspense based on timing and near misses. The protagonist is an adventurer rather than a government employee. Being bigger than life, the adventure genre contains a lot of explosive action throughout the movie.
Remember that the story treatment, character background, and character development are big differentiations and distinctions that separate genres. The plot and the setting are also different between genres, and are reflective of the story and the types of characters. Science fiction is linked to the previous genres of crime, Westerns, war, spy, and adventure by the basic theme.
However, the genre elements are totally different. See word origin. The definition of a genre is a category of art, music or literature. An example of genre is rock and roll. A French word meaning category, class, style, type or variety. Pronounced " zhawn -ruh," a music genre is a music category such as classical, jazz and rock. Designating or of a type of book, film, etc. A kind, or type, as of works of literature, art, etc. Designating or of a kind of painting in which subjects or scenes from everyday life are treated realistically.
A kind ; a stylistic category or sort , especially of literature or other artworks. These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'genre. Send us feedback. French, from Middle French, kind, gender — more at gender. See more words from the same year. Accessed 14 Nov. Nglish: Translation of genre for Spanish Speakers.
Britannica English: Translation of genre for Arabic Speakers. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Save Word. Essential Meaning of genre. Full Definition of genre. Synonyms Did you know? Synonyms for genre Synonyms breed , class , description , feather , ilk , kidney , kind , like , manner , nature , order , sort , species , strain , stripe , type , variety Visit the Thesaurus for More.
Did you know?
0コメント