Screwball comedies thrived during the ‘30s and 40’s when Hollywood needed to distract an economically impoverished and war-abused populace with flamboyant, romantically playful, movies. It is a form that prizes style over content. There is plenty of calamity, but never any tragedy.
Free-willed female characters were an important aspect of a farce-based genre informed by the plays of Oscar Wilde (“The Importance of Being Earnest”), William Shakespeare (“Much Ado About Nothing”), Noel Coward (“Private Lives”), and George Bernard Shaw (“Pygmalion”).
At a time when many thousands of physically and mentally injured soldiers were returning home from war to be cared for by empathetic female nurses, the cartoonish nature of screwball comedies provided a safe form of escapism.
Still, the genre presents an insatiable fascination with mixing affluent elite members of American society with lower class characters. When William Powell’s Nick Charles shares his wife Nora’s (Myrna Loy) wealth on his old impoverished (read homeless) buddies by inviting them up to a high-society party he and Nora are throwing, we delight in the social contrast.
Sex was notably absent from the innuendo-laden genre, thereby providing a psychological refuge for a large number of soldiers made impotent by the ravages of their wartime adventures. A tongue-in-cheek battle of the sexes supplanted the need for sexual expression. Sustained sexual tension carried the genre’s fundamental form of suspense. It was a place where emasculation could be celebrated. Private time was for flirting, talking, or even singing. The genre sprang up as a direct response to the Motion Picture Production Code (a.k.a. the Hayes Code), which was established in 1930 as a way of defining America’s famously repressive view of human sexuality. Male characters tend to be more naive than their female counterparts.
A common screwball trope revolves around an apparently incompatible couple whose divergent polarities eventually switch to form a magnetic bond. Frequently it is a woman in pursuit of her man, who seals the deal.
The exaggerated genre also gave knowing winks to America’s underground gay culture with a camp sensibility before there was such a thing as camp (see Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” — 1964). “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” can easily be construed as a neo-screwball comedy. Screwball comedy is nothing if not an unintentionally camp style.
Blending farce with slapstick comic tropes enabled Hollywood’s stable of directors (such as Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger) to play fast and loose with social conditions that might otherwise have attracted suspect attention. Class lines could be crossed, allowing lower-class characters equal footing with their economic betters.
Miscommunication, mistaken identities, and casual misunderstandings could reliably be blamed for giving men an excuse to not only don women’s clothing, but also act the part of the opposite sex, however unconvincingly (see Billy Wilder’s “Some Like it Hot”). Like the burgeoning film noir movement of the early ‘40s fast-paced repartee was used to heighten tempo and mask glaringly obvious plot devices. The leopard in Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” is hardly a necessary foil for Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant to play off of, but it gives the movie a zippy random excuse for a chase scene to ensue whenever the action starts to flag.
Screwball comedy’s parallel trajectory to film noir petered out in the late ‘50s as the onslaught of television, combined with economic and political changes, sent filmmakers and audiences in new directions. Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave contributed to post-modern sensibilities that blew the world cinema wide open during the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Screwball comedy was an all-but-forgotten genre by the time Peter Bogdanovich momentarily revived it in 1972 with “What’s Up, Doc?.” Bogdanovich’s picture represents one of the finest modern updates to the category. Although the Coen Brothers represent modern cinema’s most ardent inventors of screwball comedies (see “Raising Arizona” and “The Hudsucker Proxy”), they have not met with the same level of success.
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