Our timeless romance with screwball comedy
Ninety years ago, Columbia Pictures released a film that transformed the trajectory of American screen comedy.
Frank Capra’s “It Happened One Night” tells the story of spoiled Park Avenue heiress Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert), who meets newspaper reporter Peter Warne (Clark Gable) on a Greyhound bus in Miami. Ellie has just run away from her overbearing father, who disapproves of her recent elopement. Peter recognizes Ellie from the headlines and makes her an offer: He’ll help her return to New York to reunite with her husband if she gives him an exclusive scoop he can sell to his editor. Ellie accepts, and along the way home, they fall madly in love.
The 1934 tale of romantic yearning within a battle of the sexes dynamic became one of the first screwball comedies.
The genre envisioned a world full of fast-talking dames, madcap antics, and romance, all set against the backdrop of economic upheaval. It emerged as the United States grappled with the Great Depression, which rears its ugly head throughout screwball comedies, thematically puncturing some of their most jubilant moments. In a scene from “It Happened One Night,” Peter, Ellie, and the other bus passengers break out into a chorus of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Capra captures class solidarity with immense warmth and grace, but that joyful camaraderie falls back down to Earth with the fearful scream of a young boy whose mother has fainted from hunger. In Mitchell Leisen’s “Easy Living” (1937), protagonist Mary Smith grudgingly breaks her piggy bank to scrimp together enough money to cover her $7 weekly rent. And in Gregory La Cava’s “My Man Godfrey” (1936)—perhaps the most socially engaged film of the classical screwball era—forgotten men become collectible objects in a scavenger hunt for Manhattan’s upper class.
Despite the genre’s political grounding, screwball comedy didn’t offer practical solutions to socioeconomic precarity. Philosopher Stanley Cavell once mused that screwball comedies were “fairytales for the Depression”—where else but screwball could a $58,000 sable fur coat fall on a working-class woman’s head and turn her life upside down? In the screwball fairyland, the Depression’s omnipresence is counterbalanced with kookiness and absurdity.
Screwball’s proclivity for the fantastic is also reflected in the genre’s approach to romance, which it navigated amid the constraints of the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code. To stave off the looming threat of federal censorship laws, in July 1934, Hollywood studios uniformly implemented this series of guidelines, informally known as the Hays Code. It regulated everything from how scripts could approach topics such as crime, adultery, and sex. And it dictated that all movies must communicate redeeming social mores.
Cavell later dubbed screwball comedy the “re-marriage” genre because it included so many storylines about couples that reconcile after a period of separation. This recurring narrative arc was a direct response to the Code’s moral mandate; the head of its enforcement body, Joseph Breen, a staunch Catholic, believed that marriage was the foundation of a healthy society, and that American films should uphold traditional family values.
One of the genre’s most popular movies—Leo McCarey’s “The Awful Truth” (1937)—is about a married couple, Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne), who begin divorce proceedings following a series of misunderstandings. But like a fairytale, they reunite—just before the stroke of midnight, on the eve before their divorce is finalized. In the screwball world, divorce inspires metamorphosis and growth: Characters learn about themselves and their capacity for love. “For better or for worse” becomes the ultimate awful truth, and Jerry and Lucy’s separation reminds them why they fell in love with each other in the first place.
The classical screwball era lasted until the onset of World War II when the spread of fascism and the horrors of war made the genre’s domestic politics seem quaint. Despite its brief window of production, the genre made an outsized impact on the film industry.
Nearly a century has passed since the birth of the genre, and it continues to prove timeless in what it can say about life and love, especially amid hard times. Screwball comedy celebrates silliness, even as it magnifies the razor-sharp line between luck and misfortune. It celebrates the joy and whimsy of fun, particularly in moments of grief and uncertainty. In defiance of reality, it imagines up worlds of charming romantic entanglements, pratfalls, and play, where leopards roam free, bears ride motorcycles, and an anti-aging elixir opens up the wealth spring of youth. Most importantly, it speaks to camaraderie and the resilience of the human spirit, reminding us that regardless of circumstance, we all strive for love, compassion, and community.
Olympia Kiriakou is a film historian who specializes in stardom, gender and genre in classical Hollywood. This was written for Zócalo Public Square.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Our timeless romance with screwball comedy