ABSTRACT
Some movies are obviously political. * Films like Z, Missing, Country, or Advise and Consent are explicitly concerned with historical or imagined political events. In these movies, the story itself is about politics to the extent that any discussion of plot, character, or theme must deal, in some way, with social and political issues. Another group of movies is implicitly political: the story itself may be about romance or adventure, but the setting is political or there are political issues in the background. This tends to be the case with most war and spy movies. Casablanca, for example, centers around the romance of Ilsa and Rick, but the fate of that romance and of its protagonists is shaped by the wartime setting of their love. Still another class of films—Murphy's Romance, Fatal Attraction, In the Heat of the Night,and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner are instances—don’t seem at first to be political at all, but if we extend the conception of politics to include “sexual” or “racial” politics, these films, too, assume a political aspect Though there are political events in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or Star Wars, it seems a bit much to say that these films are primarily about politics. Certainly Snow White can be said to have an implicit sexual politics as some feminists have argued, but does it have a sexual politics in the same sense as Murphy's Romancel
