“I was curious to see how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits conducted themselves,” he dryly informs the society swells. In My Man Godfrey, William Powell’s Godfrey, a “forgotten man,” goes from living in a city dump packing box to buttling in the home of the madcap Bullock family, but not before he takes the opportunity to witness the heartless scavenger hunt proceedings at a swank hotel. Audiences applauded when Clark Gable’s cynical newspaper man tells off Claudette Colbert’s runaway poor little rich girl: “You’re all a lot of hooey to me.” My Man Godfrey, which kicks off a prime time Valentine’s Day screwball binge, takes the genre elements introduced in It Happened One Night and jacks them up way past 11.įor example, Depression-era screwball comedies got much of their comic juice from taking the very wealthy down a peg or two. Hear me out on this one: The first Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movie introduced many touchstones of the franchise, but it is a more conventional comedy than the later, sillier films that awaited down the Road. But compared to the films that followed, it is the Road to Singapore (1940) of the genre. Bringing Up Baby, often cited as the quintessential screwball comedy, kicks things off on Feb.7.įrank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) is credited as the proto-screwball comedy. Tuesdays in February, TCM is offering a crash course in screwball comedy with 20 sparkling genre-defining gems. In William Wellman’s Nothing Sacred (1937), a disgraced newspaper man (Fredric March) believes he’s found the story of a lifetime in Hazel Flagg (Lombard), a small-town girl he brings to New York for one last fling after she is diagnosed with radiation poisoning. For example, in Billy Wilder’s directorial debut, The Major and the Minor (1942), Ginger Rogers poses as a 12-year-old (it can happen) and is taken under the wing of a military school commandant (Ray Milland). It is romantic comedy, but with a, well, screwball twist on the conventional boy-meets-girl mush. It’s elusive to define, but to quote former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.” He’s completely at sixes and sevens, but it will later dawn on him that he loves it…and her. A stunned David pleads, “Susan, it won’t work whatever it is, it won’t work.”īut you can see the slightest hint of a smile on his face. Suddenly, Susan barks at him like a moll out of a 1930s Warner Bros. In a more characteristically chaotic scene from earlier in that film, David and Susan are jailed (don’t ask) and the overwhelmed sheriff tries to get to the bottom of things. Or perhaps it’s best exemplified by one of the few quiet moments in Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938), when dizzy socialite Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) explains to David (Cary Grant, again), the staid paleontologist whose life she has completely upended, “All that happened, happened, because I was trying to keep you near me, and I just did anything that came into my head.”Īnd, oh, the things that come into her head. The fast and furious credit sequence in Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story (1942) packs more into its roughly three minutes than most comedies do in 90, while setting up one of the most uproarious climactic payoffs in screen history. Then again, it could be the breakneck pace. Or maybe it’s the scene in Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937) when Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) sabotages her ex-husband’s (Cary Grant) new romance by showing up unannounced at his prospective in-laws’ posh digs posing as his uncouth sister. Perhaps it is best defined by the ecstatic moment in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) when dizzy socialite Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard) exclaims to her mother, “Godfrey loves me he put me in the shower.” What are we talking about when we talk about screwball comedy? “All You Need to Start an Asylum is an Empty Room and the Right Kind of People”
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