What man has done man can do

Adding to the list I’m compiling of characteristic screwball elements how could I forget lavish digs? Especially when it’s someone who’s new to the life led by people with tons of money. Rags to riches is one of the oldest premises though. I was surprised when I first realized Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986, Paul Mazursky) is a remake of a 30s Renoir film.
     Oh and snap judgements. Meeting a complete stranger for the first time and then instantly deciding to get engaged or married. Mark it part of the list. And mental illness as a comedic device.

Holiday (1938, George Cukor) is a prestige picture adapted from the stage heavy philosophical romance film situated among the American capitalist ruling class interrogating its ethics in the domestic sphere. The tone is serious. Vacillates between tender pathos and maudlin pining. It's set in this gorgeous amazing enormous palatial mansion. But like The Philadelphia Story (1940, Cukor) also adapted from the stage, you might like me sometimes be bummed like oh great we’re stuck in this set for the whole thing.
     JOHNNY CASE (Cary Grant) meets a rich socialite on the streets of New York and impulsively they get engaged that very moment. What happened to when people used to be this decisive? When he shows up in her mansion and Katherine Hepburn is playing LINDA the sister, we know its she who will end up with Grant’s character because they’re both big stars, Grant can’t marry the nobody. It’s not a spoiler. Just look at the poster. 
     Neither of the parents approve of the engagement. (Well Johnny doesn’t have parents but he has these cool eccentric friends NICK and SUSAN and Nick is played by Edward Everett Horton). But it’s JULIA’S business tycoon (do people still use that word?) father who has a major problem with Johnny’s “strange new spirited type of work today. A spirit of revolt.” Is the rich dad’s objection coded as being opposed to Marxism? But so okay Holiday deals with some real hefty stakes: love bundled with noble virtue ideology pending the approval of the rich family. Unless that is, if you disapprove of Johnny’s life goals.
     Johnny’s self made. Been working since he was 10. Wants to earn a small fortune so that by 30 he can stop working and go after his goal of finding out what life’s really about. There’s no way Julia or her rich father are going to be okay with this. And we know he’s going to end up with Linda anyway. But what about Linda? She’s supposedly deranged. The family doesn’t let her out of the playroom because it’s too risky she’s likely to cause a scene in front of guests. The film leaves it to our imagination though. We never know what she suffers from or anything about her history. Those events are only ever vaguely referred to. Her mental illness isn't played for laughs in this movie. There are a few close-ups of Hepburn in the playroom near the end of Act II where her tears sparkle like the diamonds in her necklace and her distantly removed forlorn yearning tell us what she wants, who she wants.
     This thing is so well acted. And I’m invested and moved and all for the crazy rich black sheep daughter and the freethinker who doesn’t want to work going off sailing into the happily ever after. But sometimes the whole message about how money being the god of the rest of the family is too heavy handed. That’s my only quibble. Doesn’t stop me from cherishing it as a totally satisfying escapist love story depicting a dream after my own heart.

It's a deal. It's a bargain. It's a scandal

Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938, Ernst Lubitsch) conveys a certain condition through both thought and emotion. It’s scenario simultaneously ridicules and empowers women. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife is a marriage screwball comedy that comes on like a carefree swooning rom com but goes down like a psychological horror.

     Here I argue that other movies don’t do both. Thought and emotion. In Adaptation (2002, Spike Jonze), Kaufman’s screenplay allows us to think about how adapting a cerebral source into a movie has to compromise because we’re watching a movie that tries to and fails at avoiding the very same pitfall. Irreversible (2002, Gaspar Noé) makes us feel what it’s like to be in love with someone who is everything to you and then losing her which is losing everything. It’s one or the other.
     In Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife Lubitsch gets us to think about how marriage is like a business transaction. MICHAEL BRANDON (Gary Cooper) says “Love and business are just the same. You have to gamble. You have to take chances.” (I apologize it’s obnoxious at this point for me to keep repeating this but I’ve always thought the exact same thing. Schopenhauer saying nature doesn’t care about us only for us to reproduce. Nothing’s free.) When Mr. Brandon buys the Louis XIV wash basin NICOLE (Claudette Colbert) sees through him: 60,000 francs is his down payment on me.
     Also when Nicole’s father hears she doesn’t want to marry Mr. Brandon and he starts negotiating the aunt calls him out “Are you a father or an auctioneer?” we know what she’s really implying is more like pimp or sex trafficker. But what’s up with right before the second act break how Nicole is repulsed by Michael’s proposition and wants nothing to do with him and then they’re out dancing and she’s swept off her feet? Doesn’t it feels like a reel’s missing? Plot twist. It’s because she’s scamming him.
     Here’s the empowering women part. So this rich, arrogant, over-confident American businessman thinks he can come along and meet this cute French woman on the Riviera in a luxury boutique and after meeting her one time, marry her? After he’s already been through 7 marriages and 6 divorces (1 died)? Nicole’s dad (I love Edward Everett Horton in a Lubitsch and he’s in many) gets the deal up to a $100K prenup. Cruel plot twist. No sex. Not on the honeymoon. Not ever. Not even a kiss. No touching. He can buy her but he can’t have her. I love to imagine all of these beautiful young women who some rich guy thinks he can swoop up for a trophy wife taking his money and giving him nothing in return to balance the scales.
     Does the scene where Michael is trying to seduce his newlywed bride then resorts to increasingly desperate attempts hint on an elliptical implied attempted rape moment? It’s played cutesy. But when they leave the room and she’s applying iodine to a severe wound she’s inflicted on him by biting him I mean she can only have had to be defending herself for one reason right? That’s what they call the Lubitsch touch.
     Act III Michael changes the terms of the business deal. If she’s nice to him he’ll let her have a divorce. But Nicole, not one to acquiesce to defeat has a scheme of her own. She’ll make him think she’s cheating so he’ll divorce her. Spiteful isn’t she? It works though. And yes very screwball of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife to employ such a sophisticated deception. So Michael has a nervous breakdown and winds up in a sanatorium. And this is a comedy. I love it.
     Michael tells Nicole “You made a nervous wreck of me. You tortured me. You took my pride away. My self-respect. And I took it.” He’s literally in a straightjacket because of her. And the climax at this point makes me feel like wow that’s exactly how women make you feel. How marriage makes you feel. How love makes you feel. And Nicole tells Michael she had to break him down. Now that’s an ending. A resolution. The power balance is even. They’re now equals. Partners. She’s no longer a possession, a property. And they live happily ever after. And I buy it. That’s why I love screwball. It supports both my most cynical conclusions about life and my most tender romantic desires. Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife makes me think about how unfairly a man can behave towards a woman, and makes me feel what he goes through unless he’s able to recognize it.

intercostal clavicle

Bringing Up Baby (1938, Howard Hawks) is an exotic wildlife mental illness screwball comedy. It’s about a socialite and an archaeology professor who want a bone. It’s about hunting big game as metaphor for finding true love. And more than any other film, the spirit of Bringing Up Baby best epitomizes the spirit of the screwball comedy. If a man and woman who can make each other laugh is how love was depicted during this period, how do you top that? By depicting it as utter chaos, career-jeopardizing, nervous breakdown-inducing, serious jail time-incurring, life-threatening, non-stop adventure bonding, that’s how.

     First of all make no mistake, this entire movie is about the sex impulse. We got DAVID HUXLEY with this cold fish fiancée who’s introduced clearly announcing that because of their shared career objectives they won’t have time for children, or a honeymoon, or any type of domestic distractions. And her name is MISS SWALLOW; don’t think about that name too much, it’ll only get you in trouble.
     Okay it’s time here I go reaching for metaphorical implications trying too hard to read something into a film that’s probably not there, but. Huxley’s fiancée works with fossils because that’s how she is in bed. But SUSAN has a leopard in her bedroom as to indicate some kind of ferocious voracious sexual appetite. Baby’s tame though, you say? Domesticated? Jump to the end of the film. Who but Susan is able to single handedly capture the killer leopard? This is psychoanalytic creative freedom at its boldest.
     Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn with their star personae affected way of speaking are my favorite Hollywood comedic performers of this era, and together they are why Bringing Up Baby has gotta be my all-time favorite comedy. And Grant with those glasses only enhances the contrast between their caricatures. 
 
The force of Susan and the way in which she crashes into David’s life is the stuff of nature encoding in us an overwhelming physical attraction to someone. At the golf course she overtakes his life. He can’t reason with her—just as you can’t reason with lust, nor love. And when he literally falls head over heels in that restaurant inexplicably running into her again, do you believe he wants nothing to do with her as he appears to act like? Well, he rips the back of her dress apart in this scene too though, which is pretty hot.
     That moment when David’s reached his limit and sends Susan home the ultimate male romantic fantasy of her becomes fully apparent. She sobs out of desperation. She fell out of the sky and instantly in love with this boring academic. She’d do anything for him. She never wants to leave him. And when Hepburn is crying I’ve fallen in love with this role she’s created. Susan’s this rich, crazy, impossible, reckless, beautiful young woman who’s always so much fun and so unpredictable. This is the potential of what a movie can do. The grand finale with Susan next to the broncosaurus skeleton atop that ladder rocking defying the laws of physics is the most satisfying ending of any romantic comedy we'll ever see.