La guerra de sexos en las comedias románticas de Howard Hawks: La fiera de mi niña (Brining Up Baby, 1938), Luna Nueva (His Girl Friday, 1940), La novia era él (I was a Male War Bride, 1949) y Su juego favorito (Man´s favorite Sport, 1964)

Howard Hawks, plantea el enfrentamiento entre los sexos en buena parte de su filmografía. Comedias románticas, western o cine de aventuras comparten esta guerra de sexos que se inicia con una antipatia mutua entre los protagonistas que va evolucionando a medida que la pareja se ve inmersa en sus aventuras para transformarse en amistad, atracción, y finalmente amor. Cuatro de sus comedias La fiera de mi niña (Brining Up Baby, 1938), Luna Nueva (His Girl Friday, 1940), La novia era él ( I Was a Male War Bride, 1949) y Su juego favorito (Man´s Favorite Sport, 1964) plantean la guerra de sexos a través de una inversión de roles sexuales; mujer-activo /varón-pasivo que finalmente revierte a modelos más tradicionales.

How to Employ Nagasaki: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (1982)

Not a few scholars believe that representation of scenery in Nagasaki is a mockery in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel A Pale View of Hills (1982). However, Etsuko’s narration faithfully represents individual facts about Nagasaki, but her combinations of facts are not consistent with the real world. Overall, Ishiguro’s narrative strategy is to represent as realistically as possible how a person’s memory works; at a time when rigid opposition between history and fiction collapsed as a result of the expanding literary theory of postmodernist positivism. A somewhat distorted narrative of recollections holds true not only in Etsuko but in human beings generally. If everything in the record of one’s past life is fictional, realizing how one’s memory is distorted or colored is impossible. Thus, Ishiguro wrote Etsuko’s reminiscences by faithfully describing facts of Nagasaki, for instance, nonlinguistic artifacts and relics, but making them anachronistic or discordant in time and space. This strategy resists the postmodern view of history and simultaneously emphasizes human memories’ ambiguities and distortions. Nagasaki, as a faithful background setting for Etsuko’s memories, is entirely plausible because Ishiguro was born and raised there until he was six years old. Yet, the realism of A Pale View of Hills encompasses a universal story of reminiscence or human testimony by employing the narratives of an atomic-bomb victim and a war bride.

From Good Time Girl to Damsel in Distress: Protecting the British War Bride in the United States, 1944–1950

During the Second World War, the United Kingdom became an epicenter of transnational, especially transatlantic, marriages, but not all these marriages proved successful. As one disappointed English war bride on her way back home expressed herself, she was “Too shocked to bring her baby up on the black tracks of a West Virginia mining town as against her own home in English countryside of rose-covered fences.” This essay examines the government program developed to provide financial aid and legal advice to British women estranged from or abandoned by their American husbands from the passage of the 1944 Matrimonial Causes (War Marriages) Act to its winding down in 1950. The analysis draws upon a wide range of documents to survey the formulation and implementation of the government response and to consider some illustrative cases dealt with by British consular officials in the United States. These examples illuminate the gap between human behavior envisioned by policy-makers and the more varied behavior encountered by those who carried out the duties charged to them. The cases thus represent the nexus between state intervention and the individual experience of larger-scale social dynamics set off by war and the global movement of populations.

Chapter 22

When Cary Grant coaxed Betsy Drake to join him in Hollywood in 1948, he did everything he could to kickstart her career as a film star. He used his own leverage with the powerful gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons to win favourable coverage for Drake, and he agreed to co-star with Drake in her first film, Every Girl Should Be Married (1948). He turned down several other promising films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948), to make this feeble comedy. His next film was Howard Hawks’ screwball comedy I Was a Male War Bride (1949). Filming began on location in Europe, but Grant developed hepatitis and nearly died. It was several months before he could complete filming in Hollywood. The film turned out to be a huge box-office success, but the grim political drama Crisis (1950), was a box-office disaster that marked the beginning of a downturn in his career fortunes. By this time, however, he had married Betsy Drake, in a ceremony arranged by Howard Hughes, and he was looking forward to his new life with her.