With the rich and mighty always a little patience

If I haven’t exceeded my capacity for superlative esteem beyond meaning The Philadelphia Story (1940, George Cukor) my friends is the most perfect film Hollywood has ever made to gift us with the uh stuff that dreams are made of. The dream of true love to be precise. It’s self-reflexive in that it both expresses a disdain for the American public’s pathetic moronic indulgence in tabloid celebrity gossip rag culture while allowing us into the ultimate inner lives expose of the young, rich, good-looking trying desperately to hide away from the public light couple as we steal our very own voyeuristic intrusion into their world. The Philadelphia Story is a domestic psychological dissection of the female mind and her growth into maturity screwball luxury excursion drama away into the seas of the wealthy class, which makes that rarest of all forays, sympathizing with them, allowing us to empathize with them, understand true love through them, and most importantly of all to laugh with them. 

     If Lubitsch shows us how sex is luxury, George Cukor distances us from the wealthy so that we can appreciate love’s high price tag without necessarily needing to let us take it home ourselves; so that next time we go shopping we’re a little better discerning in how we go about it. Cukor feels like our own American Lubitsch. Lubitsch is the Riviera. Cukor is Mid-Atlantic.
     In The Philadelphia Story the middle-class journalists mock the decadence and refinement of the upper-class household. But they also want to be a part of it. There’s no rags to riches Cinderella crap here. They can’t. And by the end they’ve stopped making jokes about them. That’s the arc. But there’s also this aspect to the narrative whereby the family is blackmailed by the tabloid to allow the tabloid to sneak a spread of their wedding, but have the tables turned on them, yet just at the moment they’ve taken the spoils, the final twist ending is that the tabloid loses the high stakes but still walks away with what they came for—and sell it to us with the end superimposed over our gluttonous eye candy. That’s the pitch-black noir-tinged screwball edge: the house always wins. 
     C.K. DEXTER HAVEN (Cary Grant) is screwball characteristically alpha. Everyone in the family acknowledges his binge drinking and wife beating in the most charming light. When the little girl mentions the violent assaults she’s full of glee and phrases it like “I wonder if he’s gonna sock her again?” TRACY LORD (Katherine Hepburn) is confronted with the truth by her father in Act II when he tells her she’s a prig who lacks an understanding heart. These aren’t Lubitsch ideal lovers. They’re deeply flawed. They’re relatable because they’re human. But we see them working on becoming better people. They are exemplary of the truth that love takes work.
     It’s also cool how in The Philadelphia Story the Ralph is actually a loser. When KITTRIDGE tells Tracy she’s a goddess and he wants to worship her, it isn’t how sweet, it’s how nauseating. The Ralph is typically neutral or naïve, but Kittridge is repulsive. Most of The Philadelphia Story is posh indulgence interspersed with flights of sublime wit; but there’s always that cynical bloodthirsty clawed wild nature of it all just slightly underneath. Hearth fires and holocausts is right.
     My favorite gag is when MIKE and LIZ are invited outside for sherry with the family. The sound of Liz’s camera shutter snapping offscreen with the cut revealing each shot subsequently gets increasingly off-putting to the point of aggravation. When Cukor films the wide with Tracy kicking over the table and breaking Liz’s camera that’s the kind of robust cathartic laugh which utilizes the reserve energy of the aggravation to fuel the explosion. An exhaust valve is therapeutic.
     Finally for me Tracy is my way into all this and the star in every sense. The way Act III is entirely Tracy hungover and piecing together what occurred during her blackout the night before is revelatory. She’s the light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long emotionally. Right there with you Tracy. That final exchange between Tracy and Dext tells us everything we need to understand what makes this picture work so well: “How do I look?” “Like a queen. Like a goddess.” “How do I feel? Like a human being.” 

It's not good for a man to be alone. It's no fun for the woman either

My Little Chickadee (1940, Edward F. Cline) is a primitive screwball comedy-western vehicle for stars Mae West and W.C. Fields. It’s vulgar. It’s offensive. And in its own lowbrow way it caters to just the type of ugly, uneducated, despicable American culture it portrays. There’s something honest about that.
     Along with Fields, Cary Grant, and Katherine Hepburn, West also has invented an affected manner of speaking—a brand on her star persona. Her act relies on bawdy innuendo, and double entendre deliveries. The villain in this yarn is a masked bandit whom Mae West’s FLOWER BELLE LEE has been involved with an ongoing torrid affair with, getting her in trouble with the law. The suggestively phallic titled towns Flower Belle’s journey takes her on are from Little Bend to Greasewood.
     W.C. Fields might be supporting but his schtick is as irreverent as ever. His dialogue as CUTHBERT J. TWILLIE here is drastically more stylized. Big, obscure, or fancy sounding words are frequently used incorrectly for comedic purposes. He speaks in some pithy vernacular irrespective of context using Biblical, historical, colloquial, and any other types of absurd adornment he can in his prose.
     West and Fields an obvious choice to pair together because of their complementary styles of comedic performance, so it makes sense that in My Little Chickadee they play characters who share in common that they are both grifters. Just when you think Flower Belle’s gonna hustle Twillie, he proves otherwise. And because this is a western, their vaudeville ac fittingly feels like this savage wilderness precedes the refinement of Lubitsch and Hawks.
     Did the racist depictions of Indians in the Old West really make it this far in Old Hollywood? Twillie’s servant (?) is an Indian who only says “Ugh,” and there’s a scene where Indians raid a stagecoach and Flower Belle fires a pair of pistols out of the window gunning down as many as she can. Some serious saddle falls. I’m not pointing this out to focus on how outdated and offensive these scenes are as much as I’m trying to convey their relevance to the movie. I wanna argue it’s a way of being honest about where not America, but Hollywood came from. The material as a means of linking the passing of a style of comedy with that of a style of living. It’s elegiac. 
     Is Flower Belle morally bankrupt? Notice how the recurring screwball trope pops up when AMOS BUDGE the gambler is chosen to fake the marriage ceremony between Twillie and Flower Belle and among his wisecracks we get, “I hope you’re familiar with the rules of the game.” More than implying the institution of marriage is a scam, My Little Chickadee goes as far as saying all forms of American civilization are. Twillie is sheriff, but there’s a scene where all of the sudden he’s inexplicably also a bartender (still wearing his star). And there’s Flower Belle’s hot for teacher sketch where it’s played for laughs that her math skills aren’t up to those of the young boy in the class.
     And because I can’t resist this reading of My Little Chickadee as satire of how crooked America is, that twist ending packs a wallop. Morally, Flower Belle succeeds in saving the town. Helping capture the stolen gold from the masked bandit. Using it to help build schools and grow the town’s infrastructure. But the truth that no one suspects is that the bandit will elude jailtime. And his secret identity is now known to Flower Belle when she is forced to choose between wrong and right (the newspaper editor who’s about to propose to her). Who does she choose to marry? Neither. But it’s implied that she’s available for both. So she can use them as she pleases. And she admits as much to both. And that’s how the west was won. And how America she operates to this day.

Production for use

Add rebound caught in the crossfire to the list of screwball tropes. Think some pathetic hick. Or someone who otherwise contrasts one of the partners who’ve just split up so drastically that we harbor a desire for a reconciliation with the person whom they’re better matched with—even if the relationship itself seems problematic, because hey it’s not real life, it’s the movies. 

     Think about Heat (1995, Michael Mann). The last time I saw Heat in the theater, more than anything else, for the first time I laughed harder than I ever had before during the fight between Vincent Hanna and his wife. With all the yelling and cussing between them, the way there’s this totally random perfectly cast Xander Berkeley character as the other guy, who has no idea what he’s walked into. It’s even funnier because Berkeley plays it as this boring, poor sap who we feel sorry for due to the excessive amount of abuse he’s obliterated with. Screwball is pretty dark sometimes. 
     Ralph Bellamy has been typecast in this exact role twice. In both The Awful Truth (1937, Leo McCarey) and His Girl Friday (1940, Howard Hawks). And what is Xander Berkeley’s character’s name in Heat? Ralph. Have I stumbled onto something here?
 

His Girl Friday is a cyclical codependent narcissistic abuse screwball copkiller comedy that ultimately proves yet another emerging screwball trope: that those best suited for successfully maintaining a romantic relationship with their partner also happen to be the most unscrupulous. 
     Even among Hawks’s screwball trifecta—the other two are Twentieth Century (1934, Hawks) and Bringing Up Baby (1938, Hawks)—His Girl Friday is the one that’s the most relentlessly fast-paced. Both in terms of the delivery of its dialogue and the narrative’s plot. HILDY (Rosalind Russell) and WALTER BURNS (Cary Grant) have just divorced. And in the blink of an eye it seems she’s already become engaged to a rebound. And their train leaves in 2 hours for Albany where they’re getting married the next day. So the conniving Walter has to break them up, remarry Hildy, get a reprieve for a man sentenced to the electric chair for murdering a cop whom Walter believes is not guilty by way of insanity but really has an ulterior motive based on a corrupt sheriff and mayor getting re-elected by the end of the movie. Now that’s how you craft a ticking clock plot device.
     This is my favorite Cary Grant role. The suave effervescent gaslighting defines Walter Burns. The slicked hair, double-breasted gray suit, and cigarette smoking to be forever iconic. Walter lies, steals, traffics in counterfeit money, prostitutes, hired guns, and by all appearances himself a louse conman. But we like him? He prefigures the Scorsese anti-hero. Everything in His Girl Friday is so maddeningly thrown into a frenzy that we accept all of this nasty stuff part and parcel with the comedy. Even more than EARL WILLIAMS, think about that girl MOLLY who is so exasperated by this whole rotten system, this whole rotten world, that she jumps out the window. And we’re right back to laughing the next minute. How does this movie get away with it? Is Hawks a Walter Burns? Does Walter want Hildy back more as reporter or wife? Does this question even matter?
     I don’t know where else to fit this in but another screwball trope: Williams’ backstory leads us to understand that he lost his mind because he lost his job of 20 years. Tough times. But His Girl Friday is also this shimmering example of a comedy still able to laugh at all manner of tragic human vice right before the war. When Hildy gets her scoop Walter barks “Throw the front page out. Never mind the European war we got something more important that that. Take Hitler and stick him on the funny page.” It’s a little prophetic. Because soon, the war would be too horrific to laugh about. To Be or Not to Be (1942, Ernst Lubitsch) pokes fun, but by Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino) Hitler is indeed on the funny page.
     Another tenet of screwball is that through all the insanity, to highlight the insanity of real life and adequately convey it, at the end of the film, the couple are right back where they started. Hildy outs Walter as thinking she’d be stupid enough to buy him pushing her out as a reverse psychology ploy, while simultaneously falling into it. She accepts his second marriage proposal on the contingency that this time they get a honeymoon and the next second he reneges. And she concedes to it nevertheless. Right back where they started. Doomed to repeat for eternity their same roles. 
     Beneath all this toxicity I find His Girl Friday the kind of cynical mockery of romantic relationships to be the most romantic of all. The crook scamming his mark to defeat her as just another of his criminal enterprises to keep him afloat in a sea of other sharks just as blood-thirsty as he.