Reel Rituals: Ritual Occasions from Baptisms to Funerals in Hollywood Films, 1945-1995

Ritual occasions in the movies can bring us to laughter and tears and hope and regret; the chords they strike suggest the complex intersection between American movies and our lives. Major ritual occasions of weddings, baptisms, bar mitzvahs, funerals, graduations, and birthday parties appear in hundreds of popular films produced by Hollywood throughout the 20th century. This study suggests that these stock scenes are more significant to American film than we might have thought.

Parley Ann Boswell is a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. She has contributed essays on film to four volumes of Beyond the Stars. She became seriously interested in Hollywood movies while she was writing her dissertation on 17th-century Puritan sermons. Currently she is working on a collection of short stories.

Paul Loukides is a professor of English at Albion College where he has taught since the year Spartacus was released. His interest in film conventions dates back to the moment in childhood when he first recognized that when a movie character said it was "too quiet," there was an action sequence coming. Professor Loukides is currently at work on a freshman composition reader and a novel based on the adventures of John Wise, the 19th-century balloonist.