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find themselves witnessing the St Valentine's Day massacre, in which the members of a criminal gang are machine-gunned by their rivals. Realising that the murder gang will ruthlessly track them down to eliminate them, the pair disguise themselves as female dance musicians, Daphne and Josephine, and join an all-girl band heading for Florida. Here Curtis disguises himself back again as a man, posing as a millionaire in order to woo the prettiest of the girl musicians (Marilyn Monroe). Lemmon is in turn wooed in his female guise by a genuine but aged millionaire, Osgood E. Fielding III, who is so enamoured that, as the film ends, he proposes marriage. Trying one excuse after another to explain how this is totally out of the question, Lemmon finally pulls off his wig to reveal that he is a man. Even this does not deter the doting suitor, who merely replies `well, nobody's perfect'.

Later in the book we shall consider just why the Comedy plot should have come to be so widely burlesqued in this way (a parallel development can be seen in the fate of the other basic plots). But in view of all these highly improbable marriages and unions at the end of modern comedies, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the only way in which the twentieth century could be claimed to have extended the range of the traditional Comedy plot was in the type of story where the hero and heroine have not only been married before the story opens, but also divorced. The interest of the plot then lies in seeing how they are eventually brought together again to remarry.

The earliest instance of such a story, regarded in its time as highly daring, was Noel Coward's play Private Lives (1933). The heroine goes off on honeymoon with her second husband, only to find that the next room in their hotel is occupied by her first husband, on honeymoon with his new wife. Plunged into this embarrassing situation, the heroine and her first husband gradually discover that they still love each other rather than their new partners, and by the end they are reunited.

Another instance of this twist to the plot was The Philadelphia Story (1940), originally written as a romantic comedy for Hollywood and later adapted to make the even better-known film musical High Society (1956). We meet the heroine, Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn/Grace Kelly), a rich, beautiful and frigid society girl, in her family's grand house (originally in Philadelphia, in the musical version at Newport, Long Island). Having been divorced from her first husband, Dexter Haven, she is making preparations for her wedding the following day to the new man in her life, a socially ambitious nouveau riche. When the relaxed and genial Dexter (Cary Grant/Bing Crosby) then strolls in to remind her teasingly of the happy romantic times when they were still in love, this begins to sow painful doubts in her mind. He tells her the only reason she has accepted her new fiance is that he treats her like a goddess on a pedestal, and that her desire to be worshipped is her great weakness. At a lavish eve of wedding ball, Tracy gets drunk and recklessly wanders off to enjoy an amorous liaison with a handsome, raffish newspaperman (James Stewart/Frank Sinatra), who has been sent to cover the event for a vulgar gossip sheet. This descent into an `inferior realm' thaws her out of her icy frigidity, and liberates her into becoming a different woman: with the result that she and her stuffy fiance have a flaming row. With a crowd of fashionable guests already assembled for the wedding and the organ ready to strike up `Here Comes The Bride, she decides to call the wedding off. She is nervously standing at the door, wondering how to explain it to the guests, when Dexter materialises at her shoulder, having recognised that the goddess has stepped down from her pedestal and become the warmer, softer, feminine girl he always knew she had it in her to be. He whispers to her what she is to say and, as she dutifully repeats his words to the guests, she suddenly realises that she is announcing that there is to be a wedding after all, and that