Buddy film
There are far fewer female buddy films than there are male buddy films; however, notable examples include 1991's Thelma and Louise, which had a popular impact similar to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and paved the way for onscreen female friendships such as those in Waiting to Exhale, Walking and Talking, and Fried Green Tomatoes.
[5] Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were a popular duo in the 1950s, and Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon were famous in the 1960s, starring in the hit 1968 film The Odd Couple.
[1] Critics such as Molly Haskell and Robin Wood saw the decades' films as "a backlash from the feminist movement.
[7] The decades' buddy films included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), Easy Rider (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975).
[1] The Los Angeles Times said films like Scarecrow (1973) and All the President's Men (1976) reflected the "paranoia and alienation" felt in the era.
[10][11] Biracial buddy films emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder initiated the movement with Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980).
Eddie Murphy was a key actor in biracial buddy films, starring in 48 Hours (1982) with Nick Nolte and in Trading Places (1983) with Dan Aykroyd.
The 1998 film Rush Hour featured a nonwhite male pairing of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker,[1] which the Los Angeles Times said symbolized color blindness in American cinema.
[4] Biracial buddy films continued in the 1990s and 2000s and were combined with different genres, such as White Men Can't Jump (1992), Bulletproof (1996), Gridlock'd (1997), National Security (2003) and The Bucket List (2007).
Woo manages to deploy and politicize themes of homosociality with the possibility of contesting hegemonic masculinity that consolidates kinship and family."
Woo's 2001 World War II film Windtalkers depicted two buddy pairs, with each pair indicating inequality through ethnicity (white American soldiers protecting Navajo code talkers but ready to kill the talkers to protect the code).
Szeto explains, "Woo uses the twin buddy pairs to explore the shifting meanings and multiple possibilities in interracial bonding, rather than simply recuperating and empowering dominant positions for white heterosexual men.
[67][16] Other examples include Hardcastle and McCormick, in which a retired judge and his last defendant follow up on cases that were dismissed due to technicalities; CHiPs, the adventures of two California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers; and Voyagers!, in which a member of a league of time travelers and a boy travel through time repairing errors in world history.
