Comparing Pillow Talk and When Harry Met Sally — Eduqas GCSE Film Studies C670
Eduqas GCSE Film Studies · C670
Comparing Pillow Talk and When Harry Met Sally
Comparison
What you need to know
How romantic comedy changed between 1959 and 1989, and how far each film challenges the gender roles of its time.
Genre conventions compared: the meeting, the telephone and the split screen in both films, friends as helpers, and the endings.
Narrative compared: a plot driven by deception against a story told over years of friendship.
Contexts compared: innuendo under the Production Code against open talk about sex in 1989, and working women in each.
Representation compared: Jan and Sally, Brad and Harry.
Kept to what the comparison question rewards: points of comparison in genre, narrative, context and representation, each linking an era's context to a specific choice in that film; film form appears only as brief support for a comparison, since each film's form has a lesson of its own.
A plan and model paragraphs for the 20-mark comparison question, with both films given equal weight.
Worked answers with their marks, and practice questions to try, each headed 'Practice question' with its marks.
Quote only short lines of dialogue you're sure of, a few words at a time, and base every point on what happens in the finished film.
