Another monster hit for Disney, this tale as old as time only seems to work in one direction - a beautiful female falling in love with an unattractive male. Often, the story ends with the unattractive male becoming as good-looking as the female, but not always.
My question is, was there ever a story where the handsome male fell in love with an unattractive female? Think “The Hunk and the Hag.” It doesn’t count if the female becomes beautiful at the end.
Maid in Manhattan?
Shallow Hal?
The Little Mermaid? (the tail vs legs thing, the huge graveyard of people who sold their souls to Ursula?)
The Wife of Bath’s Tale?
It is an old story… an old fairy tale. People who aren’t fashion models occasionally (foolishly) long for those who are. They want to believe that… somehow… that the fashion model would like them just for who they are.
The Hucksters and The Grifters and the purveyors of fashion accessories / weight loss products / hair restoration salves / magic cremes… all line up for miles just to strip them of every single thing of worth that they have in the vain hope that it could be true.
Spoiler: Its Never True.
Disney’s Castle was built brick by brick on the dreams of people who wanted to believe. Those people only stop when they look down and realize that they don’t need fairy tales anymore… or when they can no longer afford the price of Disney’s latest brick.
There’s a bunch of movies and books where the nominally mousey and plain girl wins the boy’s love instead of the evil cheerleader or bitchy socialite.
“But oh!,” you cry, “Those don’t count because she was really just Hollywood-plain and only needed to take off her glasses and shake her hair!”
Yeah, well, there’s a reason why the “Beast” is a tall, broad leonid man with horns and not a heap of bubbling protoplasm or a massive spider with dick-legs.
Oh, come on. Who wouldn’t pay to see Emma Watson fall in love with that?
Bertrand Blier’s Trop Belle Pour Toi (“Too Beautiful for You”), in which a prosperous man with a beautiful and loving wife falls in love and has a passionate affair with his ordinary-looking secretary, might qualify for this category: if only because the situation is treated as such an astonishing enigma.
Then why are you proposing this situation as a gender-reversed analogy to “Beauty and the Beast”?
A major plot point in all versions of “Beauty and the Beast”, from its medieval French origins onward, is that the male “Beast” does become beautiful at the end. So why would a “Hunk and Hag” storyline where the “Hag” likewise becomes beautiful at the end of the story “not count”?
Stephen Sondheim’s musical Passion. A handsome young soldier, already in love with a beautiful woman, gradually becomes obsessed with a sick, wretched woman.
In the original Shrek the ogre fell in love with the beautiful skinny human princess for who she was and in the end she turned into a female ogre.
Stop posting my browser history
The Prince Charles Story.
Are there two different movies with that title, or are you referring to the Cinderella-esque romantic comedy starring sex symbol Jennifer Lopez?
From the middle ages, there is The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle
“Then why are you proposing this situation as a gender-reversed analogy to “Beauty and the Beast”?”
I bring up Beauty and the Beast because it is the number one box office movie right now. But I think it is a common trope, and I am not familiar with movies and other media that tell the story with the roles reversed. Some responders have provided examples that I was unfamiliar with, and I appreciate their response.
I was mainly thinking of movies like “Hitch” and “Roxanne”, where the beautiful female fell in love with the unattractive male, and he did NOT become handsome at the end. This also happened in “Cyrano”, and the hero told her that the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale was not going to come true in their case.
The various “loathly lady” stories (including the Wife of Bath’s Tale and various accounts of the marriage of Sir Gawain, mentioned upthread) are probably the closest thing to a gender-reversed “Beauty and the Beast” – a knight agrees to marry a hideous woman, and once his goodness has been proven she becomes beautiful. The woman is often the victim of a curse, and in the Sir Gawain stories he is usually (like Beauty) willingly sacrificing his happiness in order to help someone else. (IIRC in The Wife of Bath’s Tale the knight is trying to save his own neck.)
For the OP’s purposes I’m not sure these fit the bill, as the knight doesn’t actually fall in love with the woman until she becomes beautiful. However, the moral of the story is that he decides to treat his wife respectfully and honor her wishes even when she’s ugly.