Review by Zorianna Zurba

Not only do we know how it will end, but we know it will end well. Boy gets girl, or girl gets boy, and they live happily ever after. The happy ending depicting the union of a couple is synonymous with Hollywood cinema. Fritz Lang (1948) described the happy ending as the following: The traditional happy-ending is a story of problems solved by an invincible hero, who achieved with miraculous ease all that his heart desired. It is the story of good against evil, with no possible doubt as to the outcome. Boy will get girl, the villain will get his just desserts, dreams will come true as though at the touch of the wand. (26-27) James MacDowell suggests that a majority of film scholars have assumed the prevalence of ‘the ’ happy ending or simply a happy ending, and as a result have not attempted to investigate it more deeply.. A key figure in film studies and a scholar of Hollywood cinema, David Bordwell claims “of one hundred randomly sampled Hollywood films, over sixty ended with a display of the united romantic couple ” (1986: 159 as cited by MacDowell, 2013, 2). The happy ending is standard, necessary, typical, usual, formulaic, and so on and so forth. Indeed, MacDowell begins his query with a long list of descriptors pulled from the texts of key figures in film studies used to describe the happy ending. For MacDowell, the presumed happy ending of all Hollywood films is a false reputation that has been largely assumed. In his Happy Endings in Hollywood Cinema: Cliche, Convention and the Final Couple, MacDowell offers an over-due book-length examination of the Hollywood happy ending. Taking on this monolithic topic, James MacDowell’s text does well to muscle its way between the giants of film studies. Through unexpected pairings and meticulously detailed analyses of films, MacDowell dismantles this “agreed matter of common sense ” (3)