"Genre labels are Useful Only in So Far as They Help You Find an Audience"

This week at Uni we are having to study Rick Altman's essay of  'Why Are Genres Sometimes Mixed?" alongside Some Like It Hot. Now, I'm going to be honest, last term I did not do the readings and kind of winged it for the whole semester, but this is a new semester so therefore I thought I would be good and start again (Plus the fact that I had to pay £5.50 for the course reader so might as well read the damn thing)

(Marilyn Monroe, in the Billy Wilder classic Some Like It Hot pictured in soft focus, 

to try and highlight her gentle, feministic image)

Anyway, (gone off topic a bit) I got a bit of a shock when I read the article for my lesson as it was actually rather fascinating. When people speak about films, they normally classify the film within the first sentence describing a film (critics especially) stating that a film is a romantic, a comedy, a western, etc... but how is it that people manage to define what genre it is that the film is? 

Well, the best way to describe this is there is a menu of genre's that were made which split the genre's up into different sections which were who would be viewing them and the menu consisted of 12 different genres. The Menu went something like this:

Male Genres

Action adventure

Gangster film

War film

Western

Female Genres

Drama

Musical

Romantic Comedy

Weepie (yes an actual term used)

Tertium Quid

Fantasy

Historical/Costume

Slapstick Comedy

Travel Adventure

If you ask me this is complete nonsense and very stereotypical and Tertium Quid looks like it is all the genres that couldn't be placed and therefore shoved into a different category. This wasn't justifiable either as fair enough it took into consideration males and females but didn't take into consideration age, race, etc... 

However, the bit I found most intriguing is now coming up. Hollywood (as in Classical and not necessarily what we think of nowadays) made a cocktail of genres and started mixing them and Some Like It Hot is a perfect example of that as it has a bit of Gangster, a lot of Comedy and Romance as well. I have to admit it is one of my favourite films of all time!