Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934-1945

Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals

Grégoire Halbout

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501347627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Love at first sight, whirlwind marriages, break-ups, divorces, remarriage… What accounts for the enduring success of the Hollywood madcap comedies of the 1930s? Directed by masters of comedy (Hawks, LaCava, Leisen, Ruggles...) and featuring the decade's most iconic stars (Colbert, Dunne, Grant, Hepburn...), these films set romantic comedy standards for decades to come. Screwball comedy embarked on two challenging missions: to poke fun at established social norms and to undermine stereotypical depictions of gender roles, putting forward a discourse that postulated the possibility of equality between men and women. Grégoire Halbout's reexamination of screwball comedy provides a comprehensive overview of this (sub)genre, eschewing the auteurist approach and including "minor" works never before analyzed through the screwball lens. His book explains how these screwball stories met the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for the liberalization of morals, with daring plots, verbal humor and slapstick techniques. Building on the work of Cavell, Altman and Gehring, as well as international and French scholarship, Halbout's investigation unfolds in three parts. He first establishes a definition of Hollywood screwball comedy through a cross-sectional analysis of its socio-historical context and an in-depth examination of the genre. He then situates screwball comedy in relation to its institutional context. An exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic meant to subvert the prohibitions of the 1934 Hollywood Production Code through a verbal and visual rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre's placement of romantic intimacy at the center of the public sphere and the democratic debate, confirming that screwball eccentricity upholds America's founding values: freedom of speech, free consent, and contractual engagement.

Part One The Screwball Expression: A Genre Shows Its Credentials

The first step in the recognition of a genre is the identification of its most obvious features. This involves gathering examples, comparing them, and highlighting the most salient genre markers. The genre’s “transparency,” whether de facto or by design, calls for historical contextualization and stylistic analysis. Despite Stanley Cavell’s assertion that a genre “emerges full-blown … so that … it has no history, only a birth and a logic,”¹ we cannot entirely neglect to establish its pedigree. It is both necessary and possible to trace its lineage, its influences, and the sources from which it borrowed, emerging just seven years after the end of the silent era. With this identity card in hand, we can cross the frontier of genre territory to engage with an extended corpus of films regarded as screwball.

The principal players—studios, directors, stars, and supporting actors—provide a second set of genre reference points. They were at once the purveyors and the products of the Hollywood system. Their names alone served as signs of recognition, guarantees of genre allegiance, as much for audiences of the 1930s as for film researchers. Mass commodities for a mass culture, these artists were converted by marketing campaigns into brand ambassadors. As such, these “trademarks” helped to define the category, contributing not only to the establishment of the genre, but also to its transmission.

Thirdly, we must consider the film industry’s capacity to try out, approve, and then mass produce stories that appealed to audiences. These marriage-centered tales adhere to a limited set of narrative framings, focused squarely on the couple. Nonetheless, simply cataloging their characteristics does little to facilitate the classification process. At once a movie category and the expression of a specific “tone,” screwball films constitute a recalcitrant genre. Hollywood in general, and comedy in particular, engaged in a practice of hybridization. All-embracing, the screwball narrative opened its arms to external influences, welcoming every style and every particularity, enlivening its repetitive plotlines with unexpected, even incongruous, tonal elements: cartoons, musical theater, film noir, supernatural fiction, melodrama, populist comedy,² and so on. At the same time, the historical context of the years from 1934 to 1941, marked by gradual recovery from the financial crisis and the arrival of the Second World War, exerted its own influence on the stories that appeared onscreen. We are thus left grappling with a genre that was constantly evolving throughout its brief heyday.

Finally, and above all, screwball comedy is recognized for its style and its tone. These unique inflections show through in the presentation of each story, and in its telling. The effectiveness and charm of the genre’s distinctive rhetorical style derive from its capacity to draw upon and reconfigure every form of comedic expression that preceded it, while maintaining the apparent innocence of a fairytale.

Preamble: The Fertility of Hollywood Comedy in the 1930s

With more than one hundred comedies produced over a ten-year period that display a screwball affiliation, this group of films has enough staying power to constitute a genre. As we will see, its distinctive style of dialogue was tried, tested, and easily identifiable, with established themes that audiences recognized and came to expect. The genre’s success made it a source of aesthetic inspiration. In the 1930s, screwball expression insinuated its way into other forms of comedy, even as it drew from these forms to spice up its own storylines. It is one of the numerous offshoots of the classic romantic comedy,³ whose family history we must now trace.

Romantic comedy—and its screwball iterations—didn’t suddenly spring into existence with Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night in 1934. Over the course of thirty years, the silent era had already laid the foundation for the majority of cinematic genres. After a period of adjustment, the turmoil that irrupted with the arrival of sound enriched the Hollywood narrative, pairing spoken dialogue with silent film aesthetics. Slapstick⁴ and “sophisticated” comedy paved the way for the various “formulas” of 1930s comedy. At the height of the silent era in America, slapstick dominated as a mode of cinematic expression. Cultivated, in particular, by the studios of Mack Sennett, the art of slapstick initially revolved around the two golden rules of the gag: loss of dignity and mistaken identity, with chases, pratfalls, and pie-throwing in the mix. Later, under the influence of Hal Roach, it underwent an evolution that anticipated the 1930s, with the emergence of character-driven comedy, oriented around individual heroes, or more accurately, antiheroes. The short films of Harold Lloyd, Charley Chase, or Laurel and Hardy steered American comedy to focus on identifiable individuals rather than the stylized “types” favored by Sennett. Furthermore, slapstick now featured storylines in which the gags built on one another in the service of a linear narrative, establishing the kind of pacing that would come to typify American comedy.

At the same time, Hollywood was mining a different vein, with the urbane narratives that came to be known as “sophisticated comedies.” Jean-Loup Bourget traces their origin to German director Ernst Lubitsch’s arrival in Hollywood⁵ and the five comedies in this register that he made for Warner, beginning with The Marriage Circle and Three Women in 1924. Nevertheless, Hollywood was not the only purveyor of sophisticated comedy in the silent era. It emerged simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, Mauritz Stiller’s Erotikon (1920) is recognized as a trailblazer in cinematic comedy, coming on the heels of Lubitsch’s first comedies, notably his now-revered Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess, 1919), which featured among the forty films he made in Germany. Meanwhile, in California, Cecil B. DeMille was setting the standards for comedies of manners, with a series of worldly farces whose plots centered on married couples and—a sign of what was to come—on the theme of remarriage: Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), Why Change Your Wife? (1920), Forbidden Fruit (1921). Other directors joined in this movement, from 1918 onward: William DeMille, Harry Beaumont (The Gold Diggers, 1923, and Don’t Doubt Your Husband, 1924), James Cruze (Crazy to Marry, 1921, and Is Matrimony a Failure?, 1922) as well as Donald Crisp (Less Than Kin, 1918, A Very Good Young Man and Love Insurance, 1919). Finally, “while the genre of sophisticated comedy may not owe [him] everything,”⁶ it was Charlie Chaplin who laid the blueprint for sophisticated style with A Woman of Paris (1923). The film set the standard with its expression of unspoken thoughts and implications by accentuating certain details, and its extensive use of visual shorthand, ellipses, metonymy, and allusion. Literally and figuratively, it established a common currency for the economy of American comedy. A Woman of Paris influenced an entire generation of directors, beginning with Frank Capra, George Cukor, and even Ernst Lubitsch himself, who made his own contributions to the rise of the sophisticated comedy in Hollywood, refining the style he had already honed during his time in Germany: The Love Parade (1929), Monte Carlo (1930), The Smiling Lieutenant (1931).

The arrival of sound upset the balance between comedic genres, prompting filmmakers to turn to Europe and the theater for inspiration. Words were given priority, and a flood of dialogue replaced intertitles. From 1930 to 1934, Hollywood drew from the sophisticated comedies in vogue on Broadway, trying its hand at “dialogue comedies.” Persuaded by the 1931 box office performance of Private Lives (Sydney Franklin), adapted from Noel Coward’s play, MGM pursued the same formula with The Guardsman (1931) based on a play by Ferenc Molnár (previously adapted for the screen in 1918 as A Testör),⁷ New Morals for Old (1932), adapted from After All by John Van Druten, and Reunion in Vienna (1933), a film version of the eponymous play by Robert Sherwood. RKO also churned out drawing-room comedies like Our Betters (George Cukor, 1933), originally written for the theater by Somerset Maugham. Warner and Universal jumped on the bandwagon as well with, respectively, Jewel Robbery (1932), based on a play by Ladislas Fodor, and By Candlelight (1933), from a play by Karl Farkas and Siegfried Geyer.

The omnipresence of speech lured the cinema into recreating plays on film. But, as always, no matter what Hollywood put on offer, the public had the final say in its success. That public showed a decided preference for melodrama, gangster films, and “tough comedies” (Tarnished Lady by Cukor and Dishonored by Josef Von Sternberg in 1931). There was a widening gap between the American middle class and the movie studios, which, under the influence of new arrivals from Europe, were becoming havens of cosmopolitan, continental culture, tending to elide the distinction between culture and class. The studio heads were more focused on chasing prestige than appealing to the masses. Comedy plots unfolded in royal palaces or London drawing rooms. In depicting the pursuit of “the distinctions of rank and power and money,”⁸ they reflected bourgeois dreams of liberty and emancipation that preoccupied a certain subset of the urban elite but carried little resonance for mainstream movie audiences. Scaling up from a theatergoing minority to the mass of moviegoers altered the financial stakes. Did these comedic stories cater to the “tastes” of the moment? If not, their language and tone would have to be recalibrated.

After trying out an assortment of offerings from 1930 to early 1934, the studios hit upon the necessary narrative and stylistic adjustments. At the risk of oversimplifying, comedies were reorganized into four subgenres: slapstick, sophisticated comedy, populist comedy, and madcap or “screwball” comedy. In the course of this reorganization, some forms settled down and grew more staid, while others let loose, absorbing elements of their predecessors. Slapstick turned over a new leaf, retreating from the violent anarchy that had endeared it to the surrealists. The evolution of the Marx Brothers in their mastery of verbal comedy provides a striking example. In 1933, discouraged by the failure of Duck Soup (Leo McCarey), Paramount cut loose the foursome. They moved on to MGM with A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood, 1935), which shoehorned their anarchic brand of humor into the conventional structure of a musical comedy. This more formalized approach limited the disruptive function of gags, channeling them toward a clearly defined narrative purpose. With these modifications in place, the Marx Brothers remained active in “comedian comedy” and slapstick throughout the second half of the decade.⁹ Meanwhile Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd faded from view, while Laurel and Hardy successfully crossed over into talkies a...