FADE IN:
PROLOGUE: The Theme of Freedom:
Over all, the operative value of the screwball genre that I think makes it an enduring one is its emphasis on freedom.
A reporter’s attractive frankness frees an heiress from the straitjacket of her snooty upbringing... A ditzy heiress frees a blocked scientist from his boring life... A girl from a free spirited family frees a banker’s son from his father’s dominance...
The message — though heavily enveloped in entertainment values — is that the goal of life should not be the attainment of wealth or social status or fame, but happiness through passionate and humorous love which can be achieved by anyone who dares to grasp it.
No more romantic notion could be taught in the years in which this genre took root and thrived.
It preaches that the best things in life are free — spirit, independence, fun. That is why the genre was rediscovered in the late 1960's, when conformity to societal norms was rejected by a generation that yearned to drop out of the rat race their parents started.
In these movies, freedom is equated with the youthful zest for living that yields to fear and conformity in adults. The “ditzy dame” acts impulsively, wants to play, punctures adult pretensions.
The big business of American commercial motion picture production demands the creation of products that must be liked by a large audience in order to make enough of a profit.
Production costs are so high - always have been far higher than any other form of entertainment - that it has to be a mass media in order to survive, much less to thrive, especially when economic times are hard and competition for the entertainment dollar is fierce. The period between 1929 and 1942 was such an era.
In business, trends are determined by what sells. Originality stimulates imitation and variation. Sometimes the successful formula becomes a brand — in the movie business, it may be by generating sequels in a franchise, or pairing stars whose chemistry satisfies the public, or when movies of the same general type establishes — in cinema terms — a genre.
In 1934, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, a little quickie comedy made by a poverty row studio (Columbia) surprisingly swept the five major Academy Awards and put its studio in the black. In the movie, a cynical reporter (Clark Gable) introduces a naive runaway heiress (Claudette Colbert) to the harsh reality of Depression life as they hit the road, spar with each other and fall in love.
That same year, MGM scored with a movie starring William Powell and Myrna Loy based on Dashiell Hammett’s novella, The Thin Man, which introduced marriage as the movies had never before depicted it — as fun and sexy.
Also the same season, Howard Hawks directed John Barrymore and Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century as an egomaniacal theatrical director slugging it out with the shop girl named “Mildred Plotka” whom he molds into a star diva he dubs “Lily Garland”.
Two years later, in Universal’s My Man Godfrey, another heiress (Lombard) saves a fallen child of the upper classes (Powell) from the city dump and deposits him in the midst of her dizzy Park Avenue family as their butler and her protégé.
Also released in 1936 by MGM, Libeled Lady involves an heiress (Loy) suing a newspaper for a false scandal story. The frantic editor (Spencer Tracy) hires a former reporter (Powell) to lure the heiress (Loy) into a compromising scene so that she will drop her suit. To make the scene appear more scandalous, the editor convinces his long-suffering fiancee (Jean Harlow) to marry the reporter.
Despite their improbable and repetitive plots, these movies all succeeded to a degree that surprised and delighted the moguls that had reluctantly approved their creation. They scored with critics as well as audiences and turned critical profits for their studios in the depths of the Depression.
How did this come to pass?
FLASHBACK:
The unprecedented boom which the country experienced in the 1920's was equaled in the movie industry of the time.
Silent pictures became the globally dominant entertainment form and the factories of Hollywood vied with those of Detroit for efficient manufacture of goods that satisfied a voraciously consuming public. The Hollywood brand names, like MGM, Paramount, and Universal, were as well known to the international consumer as Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. Hollywood’s products were its stars — Chaplin, Garbo, Valentino — and consumers couldn’t get enough.
Then, like a movie plot, just as things seemed happiest . . . suddenly. . . BUST!
As Variety famously headlined:
“WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG!”
Act 2: The Depression.
. . . At around the same time, Hollywood sex and drug scandals involving big names (such as stars Wallace Reid and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle) triggered an outcry from reactionary voices that linked the loosened morals of the age to the moving pictures that glorified sex and violence in ever more explicit productions that supposedly corrupted youthful viewers.
The industry was frantic to forestall censorship, whether by conservative state or federal governments or by powerful religious based lobbies. The result was the self-imposed Production Code, which, when it was fully enforced by 1934, required a stamp of approval of any studio screenplay before it could be filmed. Strict rules relating to sex and morality were in place for the next thirty-five years.
To add to the misery, these events coincided with the maturity of another commercial mass medium, wireless radio, which by then had grown into coast-to-coast networks. They were fueled by advertising money and therefore aired programs at no cost - after the minimal cost of the receiver - into the homes of consumers across the country and throughout the world. This pressure forced some of the factory / studios into bankruptcy or mergers with Wall Street financiers, a dependency that even further restricted the artistic impulses of the filmmakers.
When consumer dollars dried up, desperate dream factory moguls turned to technological novelties to attract customers into theaters: they experimented with color, lured sweating patrons with the promise of air conditioning, finally hit on something that clicked: sound.
[This pattern would be repeated in the 1950's in the face of the advent of television, which caused the terrified movie industry to reach for techno novelties such as wide screens and 3D, and to broaden its content by competing with European films by opening up sexually, and resorting to touchy social themes that television couldn’t touch — the so-called “message pictures” preaching about race, anti-Semitism, ethics. Today, some foresee another crisis looming as a result of computer technology altering the economics.]
The Screwball Decade:
Talkies demanded writers who could write dialogue as well as scenarios and title cards.
The studios turned to Broadway for playwrights and for stage actors who could recite and remember dialogue. After some trepidation and more than a few stumbles, they found that most of the formulas that had worked in silent movies could be adapted to and might even be enhanced by the addition of sound: epics, westerns, melodramas and the others.
Much to their delight, a new genre, the all talking, all singing, all dancing musical picture, emerged.
Shortly after moving pictures began to need words to fill sound tracks, a variant of one of the most basic story formulas, the romantic comedy, evolved from traditional theatrical forms — such as the bedroom farce, the comedy of errors, social satire, and other sources — into something fresh and enduring — the screwball comedy.
During the next decade and a half, this genre was refined in a string of motion pictures that seemed to satisfy an itch in the audiences — to laugh away the Depression.
It is unknown who labeled the product screwball comedies, a name which appeared in contemporary reviews, but it certainly is an apt title. Screwball in popular jargon, then as well as know, means crazy, eccentric, zany, topsy turvy, anarchic, chaotic.
Beginning in the 1920's, reacting to the insanity of the recent Great War, the performing and pictorial arts had turned to anarchic, absurdist humor: the self-consciously meaningless dada movement and the wacky performances of the Marx Brothers set the tone for what was to come. The devil-may-care mood of the Jazz Age provided the graduate education for the post war generation, well-oiled by bootleg hooch.
The despair of the Depression provided the final ingredient, to produce a uniquely American product that was cynical, yet funny.
Defining the essence of the genre has been as difficult as defining “art.” When made, these movies were considered as the lightest sort of commercial entertainments, certainly not as art. But in time, with the softening of nostalgic memory, they have grown in reputation.
In the mid-1960's, Pauline Kael, influential critic for The New Yorker, reevaluated these old movies that she had loved in her youth, which were then being rediscovered by exposure on television. She wrote (in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang):
“This peculiarly American genre of verbal slapstick was admired throughout the world for its vitality and freshness, and envied because of its freedom from certain kinds of political censorship. . . corrupt politicians, a venal press, shocking prison conditions, and crooked cops. . . . The target of all these impudent, irreverent comedies was always America itself; perhaps no other country could so freely criticize and satirize itself.”Screwball sholarship:
Today’s highbrow students of Cinema (of whom there are many in universities, in which film studies now flourish), have autopsied the corpses of these movies until they claim to find a profound soul at their center, an inner meaning that exposes universal truths about “The Culture” and “The Human Condition,” in other words, ART.
Whether the movies are ART or trash or light entertainments or all of the above is a fit subject for circular debate which is not at the center of my interest, but is the assumption of academic respectability.
The dictionary definition of ART I like best is the simplest: something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.
By that definition, it has to be admitted that over the hundred or so years of its existence, the motion picture industry has rarely produced “art.” The workers in the industry often aspire to artistic creation. When they do, they are bound to flop, creating bad art as well as bad business.
Some manage, by concentrating on craft (i.e. imagination and skill), to make good (i.e. entertaining) pictures that make money and are beautiful or express important ideas or feelings.
Academics are wont to dissect, collect elements, define characteristics, discern symbols, and dig up historical precedents. Rather than perish, these scholars spew books, essays, term papers, graduate theses, and lately, blog posts, many of which are a form of entertainment in and of themselves.
Unfortunately, when serious scholars and ardent students generate footnotes which assiduously analyze such topics as the political philosophy of the Marx Brothers, and the cultural impact of Jean Harlow’s underwear (or lack thereof) the resulting text can be as pompous and silly as dialogue spouted by highbrow characters in the lowbrow satires they study.
Hacks And Fishwraps:
The hardboiled artisans in the field during its heyday would have skewered those who ascribe inflated importance to work that most at the time considered to be forgettable fluffy trifles.
The former newspaper reporters who came to Hollywood for the money considered with cynical contempt the tripe that the public was willing to swallow. These creators derided what we today elevate to sociological and economic dominance: “pop culture.”
In fact, as we will see, they often expressed contempt for the public, their former occupation, and their present one. They thought of their scripts not as “art” or “social commentary” but as little more than an extension of the writing they had tossed off for their former corrupting and pandering employers, a sellout of their talents for money.
Successful writers of serious theatrical works (such as playwright Eugene O’Neill) disdained their colleagues who went Hollywood.
Almost all of these corrupted artists guiltily yearned to write “literature.” Ironically, few succeeded when they tried their hands at literature, but they did create art when they were merely trying to entertain with what they considered to be trash.
The Shakespeare of Hollywood:
Ben Hecht (1893-1964) was first known as a Chicago newspaperman in the second and third decades of the 20th Century, part of an era that set the mood for what was to define the dominant popular culture for the remainder of the century.
In the 1920's, he and a fellow newsman, Charles MacArthur, moved to New York where they wrote plays, including two of the most influential hits of the decade, The Front Page and Twentieth Century, and hobnobbed with the Algonquin literary crowd and the Broadway smart set.
Moving to Hollywood in 1927 at the instigation of Herman Mankiewicz, who legend has it, telegraphed his pal to hotfoot it to the Coast because the writers of movies were morons making millions, adding “don’t let this get around,” Hecht soon became known as the best screenwriter and script doctor in town.
For more than 20 years, he was the "go to" repairman, called on by such as Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, and David O. Selznick to fix damaged scripts.
His credited successes include many of the best films of the era, including several that defined genres that have become identified with the most memorable movies of the the era:
Gangster films - winning the first original screenplay Oscar in 1927 for Underworld and another for Scarface (1933).
Screwball comedies - including filmed adaptations of his plays, Twentieth Century (1934) and The Front Page (1931), adaptation of Noel Coward’s Design For Living (1933) and the Carole Lombard newspaper caper, Nothing Sacred (1937).
Film noir: Angels Over Broadway (1940.
Suspense: Spellbound (1944) and Notorious (1945).
Action: Viva Villa(1936) and Gunga Din (1939).
Gothic romance: Wuthering Heights (1939).
Hecht was nominated for screenwriting Oscars six times, winning twice. Yet, his opinion of the movies of his era and the industry that ground them out was scathing. In his memoir, Child Of The Century, published late in his life (1954), he nearly chewed off the hand that had fed him for twenty-five years.
His biggest complaint was the “lie” the movies urged about sex as decreed by the Production Code, which he blamed on the money hungry timidity of the “owners” of the industry.
He wrote:
“The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. . . . an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind . . . One basic plot only has appeared daily . . . the triumph of virtue and the overthrow of wickedness.
“Two generations of Americans have been informed that a woman who betrayed her husband (or a husband his wife) could never find happiness; that sex was no fun without a mother-in-law and a rubber plant around; that women who fornicated just for the pleasure ended up as harlots or washer-women. . .
“[T]hat a man who indulged in sharp practices to get ahead in the world ended in poverty . . . that any man who broke the laws of God or man must always die, or go to jail . . . ; that anyone who didn’t believe in God was set right by seeing . . . an angel. . . ; that an honest heart must always recover from a train wreck or a score of bullets to win the girl it loved; that the most ptent and brilliant of villains are powerless before little children, priests, or young virgins. . .
“[T]hat injustice could cause a heap of trouble, but it must always slink out of town in Reel Nine; that there are no problems of labor, politics, domestic life or sexual abnormality but can be solved happily by a simple Christian phrase or a fine American motto.
“Not only was the plot the same, but the characters in it never varied. These characters must always be good or bad (and never human) in order not to confuse the plot of Virtue Triumphing. The denouement could be best achieved by stereotypes a fraction removed from those in comic strips.”
... [T]hese “movies are . . .a gaudier form of religion.”It should be mentioned that these sellouts sometimes were honest enough to make fun of their own artistic aspirations. Sullivan’s Travels (1941)by Preston Sturges has the guilt ridden director who made his fortune with silly comedies dreams of filming a realistic and profound work of art titled “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou” about the human condition but, he repeatedly concedes to his terrified producer, “with a little sex.”
As we will show, they also managed to make incisive comments about sex, love, marriage, work, class, wealth, poverty, their times, their society, their fellow human beings — all within the confines of a frivolous form designed primarily to make people laugh and to make scads of money.
But I can’t overemphasize the point that although they did intentionally squeeze serious ideas into their work, they did not consider it to be art or an area worthy of a college major.
The new woman also rises:
At any rate, the academics do make some interesting points while others are dubious. For example, Professor Wes D. Gehring of Ball State U. defines the essence of these movies as: “an eccentrically comic battle of the sexes, with the male generally losing.”
He notices that in the best of these movies the female is often challenging male prerogatives: she wants to take charge, make the decisions, no matter how unmasculine they seem to be, as in a picture often cited as a nearly perfect exemplar of the genre: Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938). There, Cary Grant’s absent-minded scientist is repeatedly humiliated by a ditzy heiress — played against type by Katherine Hepburn, the usually serious and intelligent female personality — with such manic frenzy that her actions would seem psychotic in another genre (say that of Fatal Attraction or Misery).
Another film wrung dry by students is Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941) in which Barbara Stanwyck’s Eve begins her pursuit of snake lover / brewery heir Henry Fonda by bopping him on the head with an apple — how’s that for subtle symbolism!
She then proceeds to humiliate him into falling for her, keeping him too dizzy to notice her trickery (as she pretends to be a ditzy heiress). In fact, like Grant’s befuddled anthropologist, Fonda’s character eventually succumbs, admits that he enjoys being victimized and manipulated, all for love.
In a genre known for ditzy heiresses, Sturges cagily made Fonda a dim, naive heir, easy prey for the scheming female.
One of Gehring’s inciteful observations is that these characters would soon evolve to a darkened form, when humor was drained by the darkness of another even more horrible war. Stanwyk’s scheming vixen became the femme fatale of Double Indemnity (1944) who could lead the dim, drooling male — there played by Fred MacMurray, another veteran of screwball comedies in the previous decade — into becoming a film noir anti-hero.
This gender twist issue is typical of the revisionist scholarly interpretation and has produced more and more comment in our feminist consciousness-raised contemporary world. The “new woman” (a phrase coined as early as 1903) was assigned to the flapper in the 1920's. Freed by the Great War to shed bustle, to bob hair, to vote, drink, smoke, attend college, move to the city and to work, the gal was ready to make her mark on the culture. Zelda Fitzgerald was such a model. Dorothy Parker and Anita Loos wrote stories about and lived the lives that showcased this woman.
Now, as filtered in these movies made in the following decade, she is fully independent, whether a street wise working girl or an heiress — whether reckless or practical, she now competes on a more or less equal footing with the male who has been knocked around by the Depression.
He has become cynical, is often broke, always looking for an angle — maybe he’s a reporter scratching for a scoop or a guy on the make or sniffing for the con or a wellborn rebel — a guy who Gehring argues is the progenitor of the anti-hero of later noir pictures.
To Gehring, the chaos of the 1930's was the essential broth:
“In a world that seems more irrational every day, the antihero (the male) is fated to be forever frustrated. His frustration is the result of his attempt to create order … in a world where order is impossible.”[In films like The Maltese Falcon in the next decade, this will be the task of the detective anti-hero faced with the criminal femme fatale.]
He points out that in the screwball comedies, the female sometimes represents to the male protagonist an intrusion into the order that the man seeks to reinstate: For example, Carole Lombard, the quintessential screwball actress personified this woman in My Man Godfrey. Despite her seeming naïveté, in matters of the heart she is the driving force, urging the recalcitrant damaged male to reawaken his willingness to risk love.
It is true that Lombard’s character’s attractiveness is her grasp of the twisted logic of passion. She is so immature, possesses such a childlike innocence that her dialogue often seems as if it may have been written for a child, and part of the unbalance comes from Godfrey’s recognition of the “impropriety” of her behavior toward him and his attraction to her seductive power. Throughout, he treats her like an annoying minor. This conflict is complicated by the social gulf between them — servant vs. employer — and a presumed class difference layered on top of the gender and age differences. All of these are elements of the formula would be repeated in many pictures of the era.
The pre-code talkie years (1928 to 1933) produced melodramas that explored (i.e., exploited) modern sexual-social issues such as rape, abuse, adultery, from the woman’s point of view. The Production Code ended that frankness.
Nonetheless, the 1930's continued to be a golden age of female-centric movie making, with women being many of the studio’s bankable stars, not merely in so-called “women’s pictures.” Names above the title were often actresses, often a strong woman paired with a weaker male (Bette Davis / George Brett), whether in dramas, romances or comedies.
But Gehring’s assertion that female domination over the male was characteristic of the screwball genre somewhat overstates the case. Fact is, the notable landmarks he cites are exceptions rather than the rule, even in the screwball type of romantic comedy. William Powell more often played the free spirit screwball opposite the logical, often rigid Myrna Loy character, in most of their thirteen movies together.
Claudette Colbert portrayed the level-headed woman trying to avoid her pursuing eccentric mate in several notable films, including It Happened One Night. In Midnight (1939) a script by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder had her playing a down-and-out showgirl chased by Don Ameche's smitten taxi driver, pretending to be her insane husband. In Sturges' The Palm Beach Story (1942)she is again the hard-headed mate - of Joel McCrea
Jean Arthur, the acknowledged screwball comedy queen, whose voice suggested flightiness, was in fact cast far more often as the level headed one who was shocked and charmed by the pursuing screwy male as played by such as Ray Milland in Easy Living (1937)and Cary Grant in Talk of The Town (1942).
Ditto another actress who thrived in these movies: Irene Dunne, who yielded to Cary Grant’s childish charm in The Awful Truth (1937) and to Melvyn Douglas’s free spirit in Theodora Goes Wild(1936). Even Lombard more frequently was the one pursued by the frantic passionate male, as John Barrymore’s demoniacal director in Twentieth Century, and Fred MacMurray’s impoverished lover, in Hands Across The Table.
It was often the male, made into a cynical anti-hero by the Depression, who went over the deep end in these movies, dropped out of society, and returned to ridicule it and help a trapped heiress or working girl to escape the rat race.
Possibly more apparent to audiences of the time was the class and economic conflicts between the potential lovers. In the depths of the Depression, this was the more attractive hook than a challenge to traditional gender roles. Audiences loved to see the way the glamorous rich lived but also loved to see them skewered for their pomposity, carelessness, and selfishness in these rough times.
Headlines And Breadlines:
The presence of all of these cavorting heiresses in these pictures can be ascribed to the fact that so many of the writers were transplanted reporters, refugees from the sensation seeking cutthroat press.
In Chicago in the 1920's, a style called “muscle journalism” thrived when the bloody circulation wars of the Hearst vs. McCormick vs. Pulitzer era evolved into a less violent but equally volatile battle for headlines. It was an era when newspapers and magazines were pervasive sources of popular culture and created the explosion of celebrity reporting that has not yet ceased.
One of the most successful screwball comedies was His Girl Friday(1940) — a version of the Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play, The Front Page. Howard Hawks’s inspired notion to change the two bickering male characters into a male and female opened the door to a classic screwball plot, which was adapted by Charles Lederer.
Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur had written the play which was a stunning hit in the 1928-29 seasons on Broadway, staged by George S. Kaufman, starring Osgood Perkins and Lee Tracy. The first filmed version was released in 1931 starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien.
It too was a hit, as adapted by Lederer, joined by Bartlett Cormack, a veteran crime reporter for the Chicago Evening Journal where he reportedly covered “hangings, race riots . . . and other diversions.”
Lederer, whose aunt Marion Davies helped him secure a job with the Hearst newspapers, later wrote screenplays for the Powell / Loy vehicles Love Crazy (1941)— in which Powell pretends to be insane in order to forestall Loy’s divorce — and I Love You Again (1940) from a story by Maureen Watkins about a con man with amnesia.
Maureen Dallas Watkins was one who cut her teeth as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. She later wrote the screenplay for the Powell / Loy / Tracy / Harlow newspaper - heiress screwcom, Libeled Lady.
Her masterpiece was a play about two lady murderers and their mouthpiece, which she titled Chicago,and which she based on sensational cases that she had reported in the 1920's. The play became the basis for the movie, Roxie Hart (1942), a screenplay co-written by two other former reporters, Ben Hecht and Nunnally Johnson. Of course her title was revived many years later for the Broadway musical and picture which were also hits under her original title.
Billy Wilder, who wrote for a Berlin tabloid in his youth, went back to the source for his 1974 remake of The Front Page for Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.
Wilder moved the time back to its original era, setting it in 1929, saying:
“A reporter was a glamorous fellow in those days . . . [had] swagger, and . . . camaraderie with fellow reporters, with local police, always hot on the trail of tips from them and from the fringes of the underworld.”[Sadly, his movie, stripped of its screwcom battle of the sexes and rapid overlapping delivery, flopped, Wilder conceding that it is a bad idea to remake a success.]
Crime, corruption, sob stories, were common newspaper fare but celebrity gossip and scandal were a delicious dessert for starving readers in the Depression. Of course, this type of news was not new: it was as old as graffiti on Roman walls. In recent times from the Gilded Age onward, stories about the misdeeds of the idle rich had made great copy. Reckless heiresses eloped with chauffeurs, slummed with jazz musicians, partied heartily throughout the mad ‘20's. But the public’s amusement turned to fascinated disgust after the crash of 1929.
The exploits of the Paris Hiltons of their day were irresistible fodder for the tabloids in the Depression. It was a small step for the reporters who wrote stories, plays, and eventually scenarios for the moving pictures to draw on these items, which they knew gripped the public. It also gave them the chance to make some social commentary. Bashing the rich was politically correct for the time. FDR was noted for stabs at the members of his own upper class for their careless selfishness in “the emergency.”
Ben Hecht again plastered his former trade in his screenplay for Nothing Sacred, (1937) starring Carole Lombard as a woman mistakenly thought to be dying from radiation poisoning. She is made into a celebrity by newsman (Fredric March), desperate to satisfy his suspicious editor (Walter Connolly). David O. Selznick produced it in vivid and expensive color.
The screenplay was written primarily by Hecht from a story by former reporter James H. Street. As common for such films, especially Selznick products, many other hands affected the goods including others who had newsprint in their veins: Ring Lardner, Jr., Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman.
While the screenplay for It Happened One Night was written by Robert Riskin, a New Yorker trained as a playwright, the story originated with Samuel Hopkins Adams, a longtime muckraking journalist who wrote the source material, a story titled “Night Bus” for one of his many magazine articles for McClure’s and others.
Riskin had written dialogue for an earlier Capra movie, Platinum Blonde (1931), which followed a reporter (Robert Williams) as he falls for an heiress (Jean Harlow) while chasing a story about her — the first version of the soon to be familiar screwball device. Jo Swerling, a New York magazine writer turned playwright, adapted the story.
The film lacks some of the elements of the screwball genre — it is visually rather tame, except for a wild party scene, but with its focus on class conflict and snappy asides, with a strong female lead and wisecracking reporters, it foreshadows Capra’s later works, especially Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Meet John Doe, and You Can’t Take It With You.
[In Deeds and John Doe Capra twisted the screwball characters around so that the cynical wiseacre reporters on the make were sophisticated citified women (Jean Arthur and Barbara Stanwyck) and their prey (both played by Gary Cooper) were naive small town boys. It is likely that with these models and their real life counterparts, Howard Hawks felt secure in his adaptation of The Front Page into His Girl Friday starring Rosalind Russell as the reporter “Hildy Johnson.” which had been based on a male Chicago newsman.]
The outrageous antics and eccentric colorful characters that sparked these films were often just slight exaggerations of real persons and events. For instance, according to the Chicago Press Club website, Hecht and MacArthur:
“modeled editor Walter Burns after MacArthur’s Herald & Examiner editor Walter Howey, and based reporter Hildy Johnson upon a Herald & Examiner reporter named Hilding Johnson ... Hecht and MacArthur based their ending [in which Burns has Johnson arrested on his honeymoon for stealing his watch] on a real-life incident involving MacArthur’s first marriage to a Herald & Examiner reporter named Carol Frinck. . . .”The inspiration for Earl Williams, the shnook whose escape before his execution accelerates the action, is also based on a real person.
In 1923, a Chicago gangster and cop killer named ‘Terrible Tommy’ O'Connor, escaped from the courthouse four days before his planned hanging. Hecht also adapted O’Connor’s tale for his landmark gangster script for the silent film, Underworld (1927), for which he won the first Academy Award for screenwriting.
Screwball elements:
Even if the experts cannot authoritatively define the phenomenon, they have little trouble checking off the more or less essential elements of the form, which can be reduced to a shopping list.
1. Improbable farcical situations are rampant. As in the classical farce and comedy of errors, mistaken identity is common and other contrivances such as some secret or deception withheld by one from the other are frequent. e.g: The Lady Eve, Nothing Sacred; Ball Of Fire (1941).
2. Slapstick is the first element that separates (if not elevates) the form from the tamer type of romantic comedy. The scripts are dialogue driven but rely on slapstick for action and visual interest. E.g.: His Girl Friday; Twentieth Century.
Part of the delirious fun of these movies for predominantly female audience was to see usually debonair romantic leads like John Barrymore, Cary Grant, Melvyn Douglas, William Powell, Fred MacMurray, literally fall head over heals in pursuit of their woman. E.g.:Libeled Lady; The Awful Truth.
The willingness of these guys to be silly is what makes them so attractive to their mates. Eventually, they all realize the importance of making each other laugh and having fun. This is particularly true in the re-marriage variety, where the female at first disposes of her attractive but irresponsible mate in favor of solid, but boring alternative (the Bellamy role as in The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and others).
3. Along with the speed of the stumbling slapstick chase, the fast paced banter and witty confrontational double entendres are characteristic of the genre. From the meet-cute on, the battle of sexes is met and fought with a waterfall of barbs, jibes, tit for tat.
As Pauline Kael points out, the result was a sort of “verbal slapstick,” in which word gags subbed for the sight gags of silent movie comedies.
4. As with standard romantic comedies, the story arc starts with antagonism between future lovers – the mismatched pair. Usually, attraction is shown by hostility — boy hates girl and / or vice versa.
Contrived situations throw them together, as reluctant allies or enthusiastic opponents. Soon, the attraction of opposites begin to merge — one yields to the other. Then a reversal: disclosure of the deception splits the couple. One or both find other, less satisfying but more trustworthy lovers. Finally one or the other or both protagonists gets it: the final chase is on and tricks, falls, manipulation lead to true love. E.g.: It Happened One Night; Theodora Goes Wild.
5. One party is self-confident, stubborn, zany, exasperating the other, level-headed one.
In traditional rom-coms, the former was almost invariably the male, while the latter was often but not always female. As explained above, some modern critics have claimed that a breakthrough of the genre was the reversal of gender expectations.
They cite Hepburn’s maddening pursuer of Grant’s stolid bone collector in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Lombard latching onto Powell in Godfrey.
Director Leo McCarey found another variable in The Awful Truth when he had Grant acting nutty enough to break up Irene Dunne’s rebound affair with the sturdy but boring Ralph Bellamy. Dunne then pursues Grant in the same outrageous way, breaking up his rebound affair with a stuffy socialite.
But the fact is that in many other examples, the female is the one who tries to stay tethered to reason, while the exasperated male twists in the wind.
Powell more often played the eccentric, free partner whose zaniness eventually wins over Myrna Loy’s usually sensible woman.
In another variable, Wilder’s script for Lubitsch’s Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938) has millionaire Gary Cooper wooing Claudette Colbert until she finds on their wedding day that he is a skirt chaser who becomes bored as soon as he captures the maiden, leading to seven divorces soon after the chases are over. Rather than be the 8th conquest soon to be discarded, she then punishes him by withholding sex until he satisfies her that his playboy days are over and that she will be his last and lasting wife.
6. Differing economic circumstances, classes, education, social strata mark the eventual lovers.
A variant on the traditional romance trope of attraction of opposites, the mismatch of a social or material gulf was particularly appreciated by Depression audiences. Taking the rich and formerly rich down several pegs to equal the working girl was a frequent device as was the romantic lesson that the best things in life are free.
Political and Social Attitudes:
Gehring and other present day scholars claim that the characters are generally drawn as apolitical, driven by personal selfish pursuits rather than an awareness of political values.
“The screwball protagonist is too busy coping with an irrational world to consider political solutions.”
They see the form as pandering to the Depression audience’s well documented taste for escapist fare.
But what the scholars discount is the obvious social and political commentary that is barely concealed in these movies. The class conflict, the nouveau poor, the struggling working girls were well understood symbols of the Depression. Lawyers, bankers, landlords, are continuing traditional villains of American comedy as well as melodrama.
While the hysterical blacklist-urging claim that left-leaning writers sneakily inserted communist ideas into their products in order to overthrow the government was absurd, the fact is that the bias of the writers of these films did influence their themes. Boiled down to palatable populist ideals, the themes supported sturdy traditional American political and social values.
7. The romantic courtship often involves remarriage of a couple who split up in Act One. E.g.: Mr. And Mrs. Smith (1941); The Awful Truth; His Girl Friday, My Favorite Wife.
Remarriage comedy subgenre:
In many of the stories, the couple begin as happily married, but split as a result of a misunderstanding or insensitivity by one or both. Getting them back together is the object of the action from then on.
Stanley Clavell, the chief academic proponent of the theory of the social significance of remarriage comedy, argues that a key aspect was that in the values of the time, a formerly married couple was allowed to spar verbally about sex. Their “intimacy” was morally acceptable, thus passed the Production Code despite sexually suggestive dialogue and situations.
Clavell stretches the point to credit the genre with affecting social attitudes toward divorce and marriage: dragging the audience into modern notions about equality in marriage, and relationships based on love and respect rather than social status or religious and economic necessity.
Pauline Kael makes this point about the landmark husband / wife detective movie, The Thin Man, in which Nick and Nora Charles playfully and sexily partnered to solve crimes.
The essentially conservative value of love ending in marriage was rarely undermined in the genre: exceptions were Lubitsch’s adaptations of Noel Coward’s sophisticated play, Design For Living (1933) which suggests a menage a trois as a workable happy ending, and Private Lives (1931), the quintessential remarriage comedy of the more tame “comedy of manners” variety.
Certainly, the genre was responsible for viewing marriage as something other than a trap or the end of passion. Lovers could find fun and happiness with a mate in the confines of a marriage, if the models were such as personified by Powell and Loy in any of their pictures.
8. Competitors for affection are often dull, straight, bourgeois, appropriate, boring: businessmen, socialites or ugh, lawyers. (E.g., for the male, see any one of several roles of Ralph Bellamy; for the female, see Gail Patrick).
9. Lingering conservative social mores underlay the values: eg. The sophisticated problem society is the city, and the redemptive environment is often return to the country.
Clearly, the genre was necessitated by the constraints of the Production Code that banned explicit sex, censored anything that seemed to approve immorality (especially adultery or premarital sex). Critics now strain to find symbolism in verbal bantering and slapstick as supposed substitutes for actual sex. Some have claimed that the rapid fire repartee that marks many of the scenes between presumptive lovers is as near to explicit sex as they could make it.
They point to the pictures of Ernst Lubitsch, noted for sly innuendo, abundant sexual chemistry between protagonists, a subtle way of dealing with smoldering passion without treading heavily on the censor’s toes. He did it visually as well as with witty dialogue. Doors close, time passes, music plays. Costuming, lighting, facial expressions — all tell the love story summing up “the Lubitsch touch.”
The pursuit of freedom:
A serious and persistent theme is the shedding of conventional obligations in favor of the pursuit of freedom.
Examples:
In Easy Living, working girl Jean Arthur is pursued by the deceiving free spirit, Ray Milland, working in the automat though he is the son of financier, Edward Arnold.
Similarly, in Theodora Goes Wild, Melvyn Douglas, rebellious son of a senator, separated from his socialite wife, works as an illustrator of Irene Dunne’s risqué novels. While he forces her to admit her inner sexy creative self and break from her hidebound family and small town prudery, he is forced by her to do the same with his familial obligations.
In the similarly themed Joy Of Living, (1938) harried performer Dunne is freed from her duty to her sponging family by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., a free spirited son of wealth who rejected the chains of society for a dream of living on an island with Irene.
In It Happened One Night, Colbert’s rich girl buys the scrappy reporter’s dream of chucking it all and moving to a South Seas island.
In Double Wedding (1937), Powell is a Bohemian artist who loosens up Loy’s stoic businesswoman to move into his trailer with him.
Precursors of Screwball Comedy:
The type has a long pedigree, going back as far as Greek and Roman classics. Feydeau, Moliere, and other continental dramatists contrived plots that contained many of the same elements.
So did Wilde, puncturing the pretensions of Victorian society. Wilde’s plays, The Importance of Being Ernest and An Ideal Husband, and J.M. Barrie’s, The Admirable Crichton, include mistaken identities, reversals of moral assumptions, class and gender conflicts, double entendre repartee.
Of course, as with all genres it seems, Shakespeare did it best, e.g, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comedy Of Errors, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado About Nothing — in which Benedick and Beatrice delighted audiences for centuries with their sparring and provide a template for screwball couples.
Recently, Mei Zhu, a scholar educated in China and the U.S., found in The Taming Of The Shrew (1967)— particularly the Zeffirelli motion picture starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton — many screwball comedy tropes which she observes exist in Chinese plays and pictures as well.
(Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and the Tradition of Screwball Comedy, Mei Zhu, Purdue University).
The Master of the Genre: Preston Sturges:
In jazz, the earliest innovators were Beiderbecke, Armstrong and Ellington. Later, Basie, Kenton, Gilespie, and Davis raised it to its sophisticated potential.
In the screwball comedy, Preston Sturges tore it from its Depression roots and brought it into the modern era. In the 40's he had a burst of creativity that resulted in some of the best comedies of any time including Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Lady Eve.
ACT III: Aftermath - Return of The Son of Screwball Comedy
After World War II, audiences were no longer amused by the rich or the class struggle. Striving to make it in the material world of post war America was serious business and the business of America was again business. Even marriage and the battle of the sexes was serious. The bomb wasn’t funny [at least until Kubrick made Dr. Strangelove (1964) found a form of screwy dark humor in the road to Armageddon].
In the ‘50's, Judy Holliday possessed traits that compared her with screwcom divas Lombard and Jean Arthur. Writers loved her quirky readings of their comic dialogue the way lyricists liked Sinatra’s phrasing of pop songs. She hit in a pair of films opposite Jack Lemmon, both released in 1954, Phffft!, a remarriage plot, and It Should Happen to You, a premise reminiscent of Nothing Sacred in which "Gladys Glover" rather than "Hazel Flagg" seeks fame and finds it a hollow substitute for anonymity and love.
But Holliday was a rare exception. By the 1950's, the “new woman” had become an eccentric grandmother. The 50's woman went to college to get her “Mrs,” not to prepare for independence. She became a secretary or entered a career — until she married and settled down in the suburbs.
Doris Day was the personification of this type, a far cry from Barbara Stanwyck or Carole Lombard, a couple of dames who no viewer could have thought to have been virginal. The smart lanky ditzy dame had morphed into Marilyn Monroe’s “dumb blonde” stereotype. (See Monkey Business (1952)in which Hawks has Cary Grant as another absent minded professor reverting to childhood with Marilyn).
Nonetheless, the tepid American sex comedies of the early 1960's tried to rehash the tired formulas of the screwball era. Doris / Rock, Tony Curtis / Natalie Wood, chased each other with the usual tricks, seduction by innuendo, slapstick, mistaken identities, and all the other by now all too familiar contrivances.
However, audiences were now being exposed to a much fresher and sexier approach to the battle — from a rejuvenated Europe. The American product paled in comparison with the stuff from Europe, comedies that depicted sexuality in a far more earthy and natural way.
Vadim found Brigette Bardot and Jean-LouisTrintignant and made And God Created Woman(1956). De Sica paired Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in a series of sex comedies that owed much to the American screwballs, for instance, Too Bad She’s Bad (1954).
Ealing Studios in Britain squeezed the screwball formula to make black comedies with class satire starring Alec Guinness — The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts And Coronets and The Man In The White Suit.
In 1964, Howard Hawks for the last time recycled the genre he had perfected in 1938 with Bringing Up Baby in Man’s Favorite Sport? in which Rock Hudson played the Cary Grant role versus Paula Prentiss playing Hepburn. Modern critics have compared it favorably against the Doris / Rock series because the tropes work better with the woman doing the con job and manipulating the guy. Prentiss was the last Hawksian woman, tall, lanky, goofy deep lazy Southern drawl.
In 1970, Barbra Streisand turned to the genre in The Owl And The Pussycat playing a free spirited hooker who loosens uptight George Segal. Her next try was What’s Up, Doc, Peter Bogdonavich’s homage — practically a straight remake of Bringing Up Baby.
Both films were hits, but the laughs seem forced and the ditzy female by then seemed dangerously deranged. In 1979, she re-teamed with Ryan O’Neal for another screwball premised movie, Main Event.
Silver Streak (1976) reinvigorated the screwball mystery subgenre which had been a staple in the 30's as worked by Powell, with Jean Arthur in The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, with Ginger Rogers in Star Of Midnight and of course with Loy in The Thin Man and its sequels. Now, Gene Wilder is the buttoned down guy meeting the mysterious, possibly fatale or damsel in distress, Jill Clayburgh.
The movie owed much to Hitchcock who repeated the tradition of miss-matched bickering couples falling in love in many of his thrillers. (E.g., The Lady Vanishes - Redgrave / Lockwood, The 39 Steps - Donat and Carroll; Foreign Correspondent - McCrea / Laraine Day; Saboteur - Cummings / Priscilla Lane; North By Northwest - Grant / Saint; To Catch A Thief - Grant / Kelly.)
In 1988, Switching Channels tried to update His Girl Friday to a T.V. newsroom. Burt Reynolds as the editor and Kathleen Turner as the reporter with Christopher Reeve as the “Bellamy.” Despite the pedigree and talents attached to the project, the picture flopped.
As mentioned, Billy Wilder’s stab at remaking The Front Page also failed. As he later acknowledged, Wilder’s insistence on strict adherence to the words as written fatally precluded the spontaneity and overlapping dialogue that Hawks succeed with. It was one instance when Wilder’s following of his mentor Lubitsch’s dictum failed him.
Pauline Kael wrote a lengthy review in The New Yorker, recollecting that the vibrant American colloquial language that Hecht and MacArthur had written for their newsmen in the play was what made it so original.
Kael admired the Hawks / Lederer 1940 variation: observing,
“Overlapping dialogue carries the movie along at breakneck speed ... word gags take the place of the sight gags of silent comedy, as this vanished race of brittle, cynical, childish people rush around on corrupt errands.”Wilder was a veteran of the screwball genre, having co-written Ninotchka for Lubitsch and Ball Of Fire for Hawks, and directed The Major And The Minor for his own maiden effort, in which Ginger Rogers pretends to be 11 years old in order to pay half fare on a train where she meets nearsighted major, Ray Milland.
In 1972, he had made Avanti with Lemmon as the uptight son of a father who died with his mistress, whose free spirited daughter (Juliet Mills) will free him to love. It misfired.
In the mid-1980's, the screwball comedy / mystery genre came to television in Moonlighting starring Cybil Shepard as a straightlaced model who is forced to make a go of an overlooked investment her embezzling accountant had made in a private detective agency, run by Bruce Willis. Their playful explosive chemistry displayed in their rapid fire banter recalled the earlier versions and made a star of Willis.
SCREWBALLS STILL LIVE! - THE 90'S AND BEYOND:
Neil Simon wrote the ultimate remarriage screwball comedy, The Marrying Man (1991), based on shoe store heir Harry Karl who married starlet Marie “The Body” McDonald (supposedly a former mistress of Bugsy Siegel) several times to the amusement of his pals, Leo Durocher, Tony Martin, and Sammy Cahn.
1994: In The Hudsucker Proxy the Coen Brothers tried to revive the genre. Jennifer Jason Leigh self-consciously channels the fast talking reporter created by Stanwyck for Capra, while Tim Robbins plays the naif etched by Gary Cooper and Paul Newman tries out for the evil tycoon created by Edward Arnold.
The Coens have shown respect for this and other classic genres: Brother, Where Art Thou is the title taken from dialogue in Sullivan’s Travels. Miller’s Crossing is derived from the noir film, The Glass Key with plot elements lifted from Hammett’s pulp novel, Red Harvest.
As I noted, the screwball genre, if blind to its obvious comic intent, sometimes edged close to criminal obsessiveness in depicting the battle of the sexes. You could have fun cataloguing to the petty and serious crimes that passed for romance in these films: stalking, kidnaping, assault, burglary, fraud, among other misdemeanors and felonies.
On the other side of the border from the genre lay its cousin, the black comedy, which often involves cruelty, evil, mayhem, even serial murder, for laughs. (Watch any child laugh at the mayhem of a Punch And Judy puppet show or its cinematic equal, the Three Stooges, and you see how funny violence can be).
After their great success, Trainspotting, the team of director Danny Boyle, screen writer John Hodge and star Ewan McGregor turned to a hybrid form of screwball cum black comedy, A Life Less Ordinary (1997).
The plot has McGregor as a failed novelist working as a janitor, who is unfairly fired by a greedy owner (Ian Holm). Through a series of clumsy mistakes, McGregor shoots Holm in the leg and kidnaps his heiress-daughter (Cameron Diaz). Predictably, kidnapper and victim begin their romance in mutual hatred. The plot adds two angels (Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo), who have been tasked to bring the lovers together by means of plentiful bloody violence.
As in the 1930's template for the form, the woman is the active protagonist, willing to risk all against the societal norms, while the male is the timid one, bound by the constraints of guilt, shame, orderliness.
It seems that anytime an actress needs a vehicle to showcase her comedy chops, she turns to films of this genre. Julianne Moore (with Pierce Brosnan) as competing divorce lawyers in Laws Of Attraction (2004) get drunk and married in Ireland.
So does Amy Adams (and Matthew Goode) in 2010's Leap Year in which her uptight gal is loosened by his Irish charm and she dumps her conventional and boring fiancee.
In 2004, Jennifer Aniston’s free spirited girl freed uptight Ben Stiller to enjoy life and love despite his allergies in Along Came Polly.
Katherine Heigl sparred with chauvinist Gerard Butler until his dating advice loosens her enough to fall for him in The Ugly Truth(2009).
Although contemporary comedies opt for a far more crude approach to plots and dialogue and a more explicit sexual relationship, the screwball genre also survives today in elements in the films of Judd Apatow: The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, This Is 40, and or Kevin Smith, especially Zach and Miri Make a Porno (2008).
THE END . . . I DOUBT IT
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