The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [106]
We then follow more of Bingo's ill-fated romances, including another journey into an `inferior realm' where he disguises himself as a bearded revolutionary in order to woo Charlotte Corday Rowbotham, the daughter of the leader of a tiny revolutionary sect. He is eventually unmasked and his beard ripped off, just after he has directed a blast of revolutionary abuse at his uncle, now raised to the peerage, which not unnaturally leads to his allowance being finally cut off. The story comes to its climax when Bingo falls in love with yet another waitress and this time actually marries her. Bertie is again sent round to plead his case impersonating Rosie M. Banks, and the uncle is softened into receiving Bingo and his waitress to bless their marriage. But it then emerges that the waitress herself is none other than the real Rosie M. Banks, who had only adopted the disguise of a waitress to gather material for another novel (the heroine emerging from `inferior disguise' in her true identity as an `upper world' character). Only deft footwork by Jeeves, in conveying that Bertie is a lunatic who had misled everyone into thinking that he was Rosie M. Banks, saves the day so that Bingo's uncle renews his allowance (while Wooster, as the exposed `dark' figure, discreetly leaves the stage).
Married, divorced, remarried
Of course not all twentieth-century Comedy reflected this split between the romantic and comic elements in the plot. There continued to be many comedies where the two components were still woven together, as in Stanley Donen's musical Singin' in the Rain (1952). Set in Hollywood in 1927, when silent movies were giving way to the `talkies' (and using songs, including the title number, originally written in that period), the story centres on two silent stars, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen). Lina, the chief dark figure of the story, is a shallow, self-centred monster, so deluded by the dream-world of Hollywood that she believes the romantic relationship they act out on the screen is meant to carry over into real life. But Don meets and falls in love with a young, serious actress, Kathy (Debbie Reynolds). The hinge of the plot comes when the studio decides it has to put its two romantic stars into a talking-picture. Lind s grating voice, inability to sing and painful Bronx accent threaten disaster until Don's song-and-dance partner Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor) has the clever idea of using Kathy to dub Lina's voice on-screen. It is the hero's joyous response to this proposal which prompts Kelly's famous tap-dance to the title song (originally written for The Hollywood Revue in 1929), which has become probably the best-known sequence in the history of the cinema. Thanks to Kathy's voice, the first `Lockwood-Lamont musical' is a triumph, and the crafty Lina tries to blackmail the studio into keeping Kathy on anonymously in the shadows, as her secret `screen voice'. But when she recklessly appears to sing before a packed live theatre audience she is in danger of being exposed, until Cosmo places Kathy behind a curtain to supply Lina's singing voice. The audience is fooled until, at a crucial moment, the curtain is drawn to reveal what is really going on (a perfect example of Aristotelian anagnorisis). The humiliated Lina flees the stage as `unreconciled dark figure'. Kathy, the `obscured heroine', emerges from the shadows as the real star. And the story ends with hero and heroine in loving embrace, in front of a billboard advertising their first film together.3
Seven years later, however, Hollywood produced perhaps its most celebrated example of the sending-up of the Comedy plot in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot (1959). Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play two dance musicians in the Chicago of the 1920s who unwittingly