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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.

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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.

A lingerie model named Mildred Plotka

At this point, and based on It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra), the screwball comedy foremost has that cut down your rival verbal jousting humor thing going for it. Maybe it’s because I’m Gen X, or maybe it’s because that was prevalent in my hometown growing up, but I find it endearing and relatable. It’s meant to be harmless. But how fun is that?

 

Twentieth Century (1934, Howard Hawks) is a toxic screwball comedy about emotional abuse played for laughs. And boy does it work. Going back through my favorite Golden Age Hollywood comedies, Twentieth Century stands out as an example of the entire work as a whole anywhere you land on the board the joke is mesmerizing.
     The structure of Twentieth Century is adept in that Hawks is able to craft controlled chaos that manages to be both pure anarchy and build to its climax. And Hawks is the first to capture the true spirit of madcap. He’s advancing comedy into the next age, hence the name of the express train and why the narrative boards it and no one is allowed off (including us). Anarchy as comedic device is also recognizable in the way the film’s bookended with the identical scene: nothing changes, we’re right back where we started.
     Another staple of screwball is the man and woman ideally matched as conduit of emotional telepathy for us to yearn for their romantic fulfillment. But think about how clever the variations are. In Twentieth Century, JAFFE turns LILY into a carbon copy of himself—once again the ideal match. I am still appreciating how creatively inspired this touch is. So now both leads are rotten to the core control freak divas with gigantic egos deranged by their fame obsessed destructive bents. This mutual desire is so dark when you think about it. And to be able to laugh at that is truly a riot. This is an atypical plot element for screwball: sex doesn’t drive the duo, abuse does.
     Jaffe is chronically manipulative, possessive, paranoid and prone to suicide threats. Lily is hostile, condescending, defiantly self-important, and prone to physical assault. (When that detective McGonigle returns with clothes torn, sleeves ripped, and welt from his forehead dripping blood after Lily found out about the wiretap, it’s played for laughs.) Domestic violence and suicide threats are constantly played for laughs. Yet it’s sweet and innocent. I’m not being sarcastic when I say I think it’s adorable when Lily says stuff like “If you ever bother me again I’ll get a gun and shoot you.”
     And in the end there’s no way we could particularly like Jaffe or Lily, but it’s impossible not to love the performances by John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. What’s sexier than a beautiful woman who’s also funny? She has that line like: we’re only alive between the curtains. They’re playing characters who can never experience real life because they’re only capable of performance. That makes me buy it even more.