Oafs, Cheaters And Jerks: Film's Worst Boyfriends

From Talk of the Nation on

Hollywood is full of films that tell wonderful stories about true love. But on this edition of the Summer Movie Festival, we're charting the depths of the miserable, incompetent, emotionally stunted or just plain murderous boyfriends on film.

Talk of the Nation movie buff Murray Horwitz defines several categories of bad boyfriend. "The insincere rake," Horwitz tells NPR's Neal Conan, "is the guy who leads good girls astray." Horwitz offers Reggie from the Archie comics as a benign example of this sort of cad.

Then, there's "the other man, who serves the dramatic purpose of making the hero look good in comparison to him." Horwitz found a lot of those bad boyfriends in films from the 1980s.

Finally, says Horwitz, there are the real creeps, the guys who "stalk or even try to murder."

Tell us: Who's the bad boyfriend you love to hate? Copyright 2010 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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