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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Not only do The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and Legally Blonde (2001) paired together look like the beginning screenwriter exercise of rewriting a screenplay from the stand point of different characters, but they also show the transition from the America of the old WASP elite to the America of the new Jewish elite.
In The Heartbreak Kid Jewish Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin) dumps brunette Jewish wife Lila Kolodny (Jennie Berlin) over dinner at 58' 28" -- while they are on their honeymoon -- so that he can pursue the desirable blonde gentile goddess college student Kelly Corcoran (Cybil Shepherd) back to Minnesota. This scene is the turning point of the movie.
Legally Blonde has the essentially the same scene as inciting incident at 6'00". (See trailer below.) Gentile Warner Huntington III* (Matthew Davis) dumps blond gentile Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon) for fellow Harvard Law School student and brunette Jewish preppette Vivienne Kensington** (Selma Blair), whose name would certainly have indicated Jewish arriviste background back in the 70s but today indicates membership in the new Jewish elite. Warner has already given Vivienne an engagement ring.
In a sense Legally Blonde is Lila's revenge especially -- even if Lila is now a gentile -- because in the end she (i.e. Elle) finds Mr. Right and realizes that Warner (Lenny reincarnated) doesn't deserve her.
The thirty year gap between the two films provides a window on social changes between the 1970s and the 2000s. Lenny and Lila forego pre-marital sex despite Lenny's wishes while Warner and Elle have been in a long term sexual relationship. In The Heartbreak Kid, the blonde gentile wife is the trophy while in Legally Blonde the brunnette preppette professional Jewish wife represents high status and is the appropriate wife for the senator to be.
As points out, 1990 seems to be the year when elite status shifted to Jews in the Boston area and probably throughout the country. The George H. W. Bush presidency was unmade by conflict with the Israel Lobby. His son President George W. Bush groveled to Jewish Zionist power as does Barack Obama. Legally Blonde in general reflects the Jewish-non-Jewish power relations and optimistically expresses the hope that gentiles can win even though the social deck of cards is now stacked against them.
For further discussion of The Heartbreak Kid and gentile-Jewish relations see the following blog entries:
Notes
* Warner mentioned that 5 members of his family had been senators. There are a few gentile but no Jewish families that can make such a claim. The agnomen III is practically impossible for most American Jews, who have a custom of not naming a child after a living relative. To do so would express the wish for that relative to die.
** Vivienne Kensington would be recognized as Jewish in NY, NJ, CT prep schools because Vivienne is used by Jews and practically no one else. It substitutes for the Hebrew name Chaya. Kensington would be identified as the Jewish name Keningsburg (Koeningsburg) with -burg translated as -ton and the s moved forward to create a WASPish sounding name. The mothers association at my prep school in the 70s used to spend hours in name-analysis to determine which students came from Jewish families trying to pass as WASPs in order to make sure that the crypto-Jews were not invited to affairs at the WASPs-only country clubs. They invariably invited poor gentiles in order to make the crypto-Jews understand that wealth and social quality were completely independent. Of course, nowadays with Jews on top, the situation is totallydifferent, and the non-Jews often affect Yiddishisms and some sort of Jewish connection in order to be part of the elite crowd.
Trailers
Note that The Heartbreak Kid trailer does not even include an excerpt from the breakup scene.
Below is the breakup scene from the musical version of Legally Blonde.
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