Post by Salzmank on Jun 19, 2017 0:41:49 GMT
I'm a huge W.C. Fields fan, but--again--I'm not sure that I'd consider his films "screwball" (but, if so, The Bank Dick would certainly be the most screwball, to be sure). His humor is too surreal--it's actually part of a grand old American tradition of surrealism (almost anti-realism) that also contains Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy's "white magic," Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, Jacques Futrelle, Craig Rice, Ellery Queen, etc.--to count as "a combination of slapstick with fast-paced repartee" and a plot involving courtship or remarriage ("a comedy of remarriage," as some of them are called--dating back to at least Shakespeare and Much Ado, probably) as teleadm helpfully noted. (Thanks, Teleadm.) Fields's is something of a surreal fantasyland, without the grounding in reality that most screwball pictures contain (and there's never the romance, comic though it may be, that also grounds a traditional screwball comedy).
But maybe my definition is too limited. To be sure, Fields and the wacky characters he meets are screwballs! (And there's a surrealism inherent in Preston Sturges and Hawks's Bringing up Baby and Twentieth Century--probably not in His Girl Friday, though.)