Classic screwball comedies

As a style and/or a genre (whichever or both), screwball comedy may be nearly as hard to nail down as film noir. Observers can pretty much claim it where they find it. Or not. 

For instance, It Happened One Night, while incorporating certain archetypes of the form in both character and situation, has never felt much like screwball to me. It's a romantic comedy as well as what we now call a road picture, but lacks the overall qualities of zany farce I associate with the screwball designation - comic misunderstandings, deceptions, eccentricities and the outlandish predicaments and frantic scrambling and battles they bring about - present in examples on which there's consensus: Twentieth Century; My Man Godfrey; The Awful Truth; Easy Living; Bringing Up Baby; Midnight; My Favorite Wife; The Lady Eve; The Palm Beach Story and others. 

With the last two in mind, the participation of writer-director Preston Sturges put them in a class by themselves, in the same way that Psycho and Close Encounters are Hitchcock and Spielberg pictures first, and horror and sci-fi ones second. LaCava, Hawks, Leisen, Stevens, Van Dyke and other directors could do screwball, but only Sturges could do Sturges. Calling them screwball seems almost redundant. Something similar might be said for Lubitsch; civilized delicacy took the place of Sturges's antic lunacy in pictures like Trouble In Paradise, Ninotchka and To Be Or Not To Be, but their premises and atmospheres fill the screwball bill. Just the same, there's something in "the Lubitsch touch" that puts them on another plane. These two were following creative sensibilities that were entirely their own and had nothing to do with styles or trends observed by others.   

There's an element of screwball in the Powell/Loy Thin Man pictures, but they're whodunits before anything else. For purer examples featuring the pair, you have to go to Libeled Lady, Double Wedding, I Love You Again or Love Crazy. Most of the Astaire/Rogers films employ some screwball, but are musicals first. And whither the Hope/Crosby films? There's even a talking camel in Road To Morocco who remarks, "This is the screwiest picture I was ever in." But do their unrestrained farce and fourth-wall-breaking gags put them in a place all their own, in much the same way as Marx Bros. pictures were?

However one defines it and whichever pictures qualify, the screwball comedy, with its parade of madcap heiresses, befuddled leading men, runaway brides, families of eccentrics, masquerades, romantic rivalries and marital mix-ups, seemed firmly rooted in the '30s - '40s, in spite of occasional revisitations in the '50s like Monkey Business, It Should Happen To You or Designing Woman (which overlaid screwball elements onto the Woman Of the Year template).           

Until...Doris Day.

With a series of late-50s - early '60s comedies with Rock Hudson, James Garner and (yes) Cary Grant, Day almost single-handedly revived screwball. Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, That Touch Of Mink, The Thrill Of It All and Send Me No Flowers match any of their forebears for zany complications and wacky supporting characters, and it's arguable that her My Favorite Wife remake Move Over Darling out-screwballed its predecessor. By then, even Howard Hawks could once again cast his line into Lake Screwball with another Bringing Up Baby revival, Man's Favorite Sport?, in which Hudson takes Cary Grant's place, brilliantly lampooning his romantically macho image with comic exasperation and ineptitude, and the droll Paula Prentiss ably filling scatterbrained Katherine Hepburn's shoes to innocently incite mayhem.

There then followed an updated resurgence, with Day, Hudson, Garner and others carrying on without one another in films such as The Glass Bottom Boat, Strange Bedfellows, The Art Of Love and the likes of Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLain or newer faces like Stella Stevens jumping in with impersonations, misunderstandings and kooky situations in Sex and the Single Girl, What A Way To Go, How To Save A Marriage and others. Even Cary Grant opted to bid farewell to the screen with Walk Don't Run, which outdid its antecedent The More the Merrier in the zany department. Neil Simon's Barefoot In the Park the following year owed a great deal to the screwballs of yore, and Garner's Support Your Local Sheriff was a successful experiment in sprinkling screwball ingredients along the dusty streets of the Old West.

After Peter Bogdanovich attempted to have the last word with his all-stops-out homage What's Up Doc?, there nevertheless continued a series of rom-com romps through the '70s, '80s and beyond as succeeding generations gave way to still later ones, and they've all carried some of the Grant, Powell, Fred MacMurray, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Ray Milland, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, Carole Lombard, Ralph Bellamy, Brian Aherne, Melvyn Douglas, Eve Arden, Jack Carson, Gail Patrick, Walter Connelly, Eugene Pallette, S.Z. Sakall, Mischa Auer and too-many-more-to-name DNA.

And that kinda rhymes with "essay," which I've done again without having any such intentions. It just sort of snowballed, like the complications in a screwball comedy. But without the laughs.