The human race is having a nervous breakdown

Do you believe in equal rights for women? Adam’s Rib (1949, George Cukor) is a courtroom romcom that asks us to consider a topic that’s always been fertile for laughs: the double standards that exist between the male and female sexes.

     Mother of 2 treated like shit by her husband. He beats her. He cheats on her. She infiltrates love nest and opens fire. He’s lightly wounded. The other woman uninjured. ADAM (Spencer Tracy) is old fashioned. He believes men and women are different. His wife AMANDA (Katherine Hepburn) believes in equality. Anything a man can do a woman can do better. If a man catches his wife cheating and kills her it’s sad. But if a woman were to catch her husband cheating and kills him it’s horrifying. Why? What’s the difference?
     Adam’s the prosecuting attorney. Amanda’s defending MRS. ATTINGER (Judy Holliday). The defendant is found not guilty. In her closing argument there’s a scene where Amanda asks the jury to consider sexual relativism. There’s a tribe somewhere where the female sex rule and the males are subservient. And “every living being is capable of attack if adequately provoked.”
     During her closing remarks though we also get a series of singles on the other woman, Mrs. Attinger and Mrs. Attinger where the jury is asked to consider them for a moment as if they were the other sex. So three consecutive shots where each of them transforms into the binary counterpart gender to that of their trad cis one. And in the movie, in the court case, the point is to see that Mrs. Attinger would get away with it; free of our stringent moral condemnation, were she a man. However. In a way something else happens.
     When each of the two women are in their drag king shots—thanks to John Waters movies for where I picked up that term—there’s something dramatic about it. Serious. They’re dashing. But when it’s finally on Tommy Ewell, in drag, he’s a clown act. He looks ridiculous. Of course it’s played for laughs. But I think it brings up an interesting point to ponder about society. Am I allowed to say that there are trans and nonbinary people that I’ve taken seriously, yet there have also been times when that initial reaction has been less so?

 

Adam and Amanda have a dream domestic life together. I derive so much comfort vicariously when he’s going through the fridge and sorting through the lamb, chutney, wine and on a whim they decide on curry. They’re happy. The get along at home and argue in court.
     After the verdict they’re on the rocks. The neighbor is coming onto her and Adam busts in pistol drawn. Amanda breaks down and decries “Adam, no one has a right to [murder their spouse].” So Amanda won the legal argument, but Adam won the moral argument. Tricky?
     They reconcile. At home Adam mentions running on some Republican platform, to which Amanda counters that she’s interested in running against him as a Dem. Adam then threatens to cry if she does. She’s incredulous. He proves to her that when he cried during the legal division of their assets with the accountant as part of their divorce he was faking. The final word in the movie is that the whole time some part of Adam has known there’s not really that much of a difference between the sexes.
     But they both agree to the compromise that there is. A little difference. And I’ve always thought Americans, if not all people, are wired in some way to respond to a good fight between two opposing forces. They will it into existence. Like a boxing match. Like all the sports between two teams. Democrat vs Republican. Men vs Women. Prosecution vs Defense. God and the Devil. Good vs Evil. Adam and Eve. Free will vs human nature. Will and representation. Spirit vs the flesh. Shot reverse shot. Film and video.

Youth belongs to youth. Beauty to beauty

Things have gotten pretty dark. Some of these postwar films are vicious. I’m mostly thinking Monsieur Verdoux and A Foreign Affair. They weigh on you. They’re heavy with death. What better to follow them up with than a movie that attempts to return to the silly, exasperated, manic tantrum explosive type of farce where it all began?

     Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges) is a fundamental screwball nightmare warning condemning age-gap romantic entanglements, by showing the requisite jealousy, insecurity, and paranoia they bring; though it also both brings the era of the Golden Age to a close and cathartically resets it.
     As an allegory for jealousy, it’s fitting that the report SIR ALFRED CARTER (Rex Harrison) receives that his wife DAPHNE (Linda Darnell) is unfaithful gradually begins with its unsolicited, unwelcome, unavoidable boring into his conscience. He rips it up, throws it away, kicks the dustbin out of the room; burns it; destroys all copies of it. But it’s spectral-elusive. You can’t destroy something that’s not of this world. It’s sad, the wisdom SWEENEY the detective leaves the great conductor with, that men should just be happy if they get an hour or a week with a beautiful woman, because it can’t last. It isn’t viable. Nature commands that they leave you for someone younger, better looking.
     The cucked conductor imagines three different scenarios to deal with his wife’s cheating—a passage that makes up the middle of the movie. They each comprise parts something like: revenge, moral high ground, and game of fate. The first sequence is the most elaborate. When the conductor takes a straight razor and murders his wife, frames her lover, and gets away with it, after being cleared in court there’s this shot of him laughing belligerently, and I’m laughing right there with him. 
     But in the third fantasy, when the conductor confronts his wife, with deranged delight he tells her about knifing her and that “my dear, your head nearly came off,” murder stops being funny. It’s like Unfaithfully Yours has some psychic connection to Nicole Brown. This movie reminds us that once dark impulses reach a certain point, they’re not even funny in movies. Even worse, the scene after this the conductor keeps trying on leather gloves that are too small for him to fit his hands into.
     So how does Unfaithfully Yours reset the comedy mechanism? The second act at the concert performance was all in his head. Now as the third act begins, he attempts to carry out his plans in real life. But he can’t. To turn real life into the illusion is impossible. What ensues is an inescapable slapstick routine that forces upon him the futility of attempting to leave the illusion. He’s in a comedy. Its tone is incontrovertible. 
     And as we sensed all along, his wife never was cheating. I was kidding earlier. The movie has nothing against age-gap relationships. Nor does it dissuade anyone from finding the woman of your dreams and living happily ever after with her. The joke was on him. And the joke was on us. For the rule of screwball is be careful when jumping to conclusions based on misleading appearances. 

Some like it cold

So what have we learned from The Golden Age about love? That those who are best suited for it are thieves, spoiled shallow wealthy brats, narcissists, tyrants, emotional masochists, greedy capitalists, those suffering from mental illness, con-artists, social climbers, career opportunists, blackmailers, murderers, but most of all those driven by the sex impulse? And how it helps to pass yourself off as someone you're not? 

     Why does the screwball show us all this? What’s the point? Because cinema’s greatest power is to communicate emotion. Love is irrational. Emotions ignore reason, that’s what makes them emotions. What seem like the worst character traits to the intellect ring true as the course of nature in pursuit of sex and love because they’re emotionally authentic. Relatable. Emotions, like cinema, are illusions; some for love, some for tears.

 

Here's a great character in a comedy we haven’t seen yet, a Nazi slut. A Foreign Affair (1948, Billy Wilder) throws us in the middle of the crossfire, looked at from any angle as survival instinct or self-interests ensnared by motivations and circumstances beyond their grasp; their hearts, their bodies, goods to be bought, sold, or traded on the blackmarket of human whimsy. It’s about a frigid woman and a whore. One incapable of love and one who offers it freely. But in the end who’s to say which is which?
     Jean Arthur is FROST. Dietrich is VON SCHLUETOW. Wilder inherited subtlety, innuendo, double entendre, sneaking in jokes and the like from Lubitsch. Dietrich’s name is supposed to suggest slut. When Jean Arthur’s character is asking how to spell “sloot-oh,” the officer throws in “with the umlaut.” If anything, I will say A Foreign Affair is fair to both women; fair to both sides. What I take from it is that Americans and Germans are pretty much the same. Germans aren’t all Nazis. Well, some are. Some will always be. Some were caught up in it and then tried to move on. And for many, it wasn’t easy. When Erika Von Schluetow says a woman goes with whatever’s in fashion, she’s saying transactional sex, hairstyles, outfits, make-up looks, shoes, joining the Nazis, (can) all (be) frivolous, impulsive, meaningless temporary fixations. And I believe her. For who’s to judge a woman’s character? Who knows what it’s like for her? What she was up against?
     The first tenderness for me is in Act II when Frost recounts her woeful account of what would lead her to nearly cry her eyes out of her head. But the first pain is approaching the second act break when PRINGLE confronts Erika with that line “How much of a Nazi were you?” (We know what he really means by that.) Afterwards when Pringle takes Frost on a date to the Lorelei and Erika is singing and spots them, that’s the low point for me. Erika is made to feel used up. Love can make you feel like that.
     It’s even worse when Erika tells Frost about what happened to her after the war. “What do you think it was like being a woman when the Russians first stepped in?” My imagination conjures up the worst. However. At the end the when the COL arrests Erika and she solicits him, out of indignant resignation he orders a bunch of MPs to see to her—yet we are given to surmise instead she’s in for a gangbang. And she’s coy about it. At this juncture I rethink everything from earlier. Maybe she made up stuff about the Russians to manipulate Frost? Maybe she doesn’t love Pringle. When he’s in her room at the beginning and with her neck in his hands he says “Why don’t I choke you a little? Break you in two. Build a fire under you, you blonde witch,” this could likely be more of an affair of passion.
     Pringle is a man. A man who uses Erika for sex like she uses him for military protection. When Frost brings Pringle that chocolate cake with I love you written again and again in frosting, he sells it—poignant image. So the fitful ending is Pringle is stuck with Frost. Erika, those GIs are finished running a train on her, walks away free and clear. But what about Frost?
     Frost is the only one who doesn’t realize she’s being used. And therefore it’s her I feel sad for. Erika tells her: “Some people are lucky at love. Some people are jinxed. You shouldn’t even sit down at the table.” But Frost is also a congresswoman from Iowa who’s getting married to the war hero Army Captain from her home state. So I think I’m safe in concluding that A Foreign Affair is about people not necessarily being what they appear; that there’s more to it. Don’t judge people based on moral prejudices. Sex, love, what’s the difference? When it comes to matters of the heart it’s every man for himself blackmarket. Or, some people are lucky and some people are just jinxed. But who’s to say which is which?

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world. Not even our troubles

Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Charles Chaplin) is a poisonous disillusionment melodrama black screwball serial killer satire existential tragedy morality tale that posits the thesis that good and bad are arbitrary. It’s about accepting your destiny. Or the motto I live by: don’t let no one get you down.

     M. Verdoux has this dichotomy depicted in an early scene where he’s murdered one of his wives and burns her remains out behind their house in an incinerator, but he won’t step on a caterpillar. He and the household where he resides with his real wife and son are vegetarian. There’s a bit of moralizing where he tells his son not to pull the cat’s tail. The warning that follows is violence begets violence. We think this foreshadows M. Verdoux's guillotine fate to atone for his murders; but really the subtext is the irony that confronts the matter of justifying survival amidst economic depression and world wars.
     M. Verdoux kills old women and ugly women. Even the families of the women he murders and their social circles are depicted as obnoxious, argumentative, and deplorable. The funniest of these wives is the character Martha Raye plays, ANNABELLA BONHEUR, an embodiment of economic resentment. Annabella is sour, loud, ill-mannered, and frivolous with her new money winnings from the lottery. 
     The midpoint is when M. Verdoux meets THE GIRL, a Belgian refugee he unwittingly lures into a scheme wherein he intends to experiment with a new poison formula, who rekindles his faith in humanity. She’s sweet. Pretty. Young. He identifies with her because she just got out of jail for theft (to survive). And he shares something else in common with her. They both loved and took care of an invalid. It’s sappy shorthand for good natured sacrifice but I’ll let it slide. Because in the end the difference between them is she marries into the industrial military complex, so killing millions will afford her wealth and luxury, but he only murdered 14 women so he’s merely an expendable derelict sentenced to death.
     The film gives the impression that M. Verdoux’s ultimate destiny is the guillotine. But that’s oversimplifying. There’s also earlier that line from Schopenhauer, it’s the approach of death that’s terrifying though. Notice how after the stock market crashes in 1932 and there’s the guy with the gun to his head, and the guy plummeting out the window, then we hear what happened to M. Verdoux’s family. We hear that his home was foreclosed on. (But he gave his wife the deed on their 10th wedding anniversary.) So that means we weren’t shown or told, but must assume that he mortgaged that home at some point. He loses his family. But again we don’t get to know how or why. These crucial plot points withheld from us prefigure his destiny.
     Monsieur Verdoux is telling us never to give up the fight. And if its sentiment is that the world was falling apart during the great depression because of the collapse of financial institutions, and global military conflicts, that’s pretty much as true today as it was then. So it’s okay to keep your zest for bitterness intact. And love. Just don’t fall into despair. It lulls the mind into indifference. 
     At first it’s weird how often Chaplin looks at the camera. And how blatant he is when it comes to grandstanding. But it all becomes part of this character he’s created. He took Landru as jumpoff then made M. Verdoux completely his own. I can’t get enough of his romantic pickup lines and false flattery cooing he uses on all the dowagers, spinsters, and uggos. Monsieur Verdoux might be the first screwball legitimately to get away without a hint of sex. It might also be the first black comedy? And yeah for all its misanthropic farce, I do think it balances out with Chaplin’s tender metaphysical allegory. Also why don’t I ever get tired of watching this movie?

Lubitsch's final film is my favorite

Cluny Brown (1946, Ernst Lubitsch) is a profoundly bleak screwball where the oppressive force of the upper class is no better than the hopelessly stifling plight of the lower class. Concurrent alongside this there’s its basic premise, which introduces a cockney twentysomething orphan whose naivete precludes any instinct she might have to restrain her wanton sexual desperation and her chance encounter with a middle-aged fuckboy whom the narrative deliberately positions on an unavoidable course as a reoccurring mentor to her by way of random events.

     Plumbing is code for sex. In the first act CLUNY BROWN (Jennifer Jones) is introduced knocking on the door of these two men to unclog a drain, her first words, “Should we have a go at it?” They get her drunk. After she’s unclogged it she’s sprawled on her back cooing how she feels chirrupy and like a Persian cat. And when she’s at Friar’s Carmel Manor, the master of the house has that line: “You mean to tell me young girls go in for plumbing nowadays?” to which Cluny replies, “It’s such fun.” And her first night staying there, when the heads of the domestic staff catch her leaving the room of the playboy BELINSKI (Charles Boyer), she exclaims: “I wish I could roll up my sleeves and roll down my stockings and unloosen the joint bang bang bang bang.” The Act II break is Cluny shames the mother of her fiancé at a dinner party at his home because she springs into action with her plumbing skills in the middle of a speech he’s giving. And later, with disdain he reprimands her as being a disgrace because she’s “subject to pipe impulses.”
     How should we take their respective promiscuous tendencies? Is she a slut? Is he a player? Or are they just the way they are by nature and should be free from moral judgment? In Cluny Brown it appears to be all for laughs anyway. Or does it? The theme of Cluny Brown as told to us is: knowing one’s place. With the philosophical implication who’s to say what one’s place is? Who knows what one’s place is? Act II begins with Cluny being courted by the local chaste pharmacist WILSON, played with the same nasal British lilt he voiced the caterpillar with in Alice in Wonderland (1951), Richard Haydn. There’s a scene in his residence where he shows Cluny this picture painted by hand he’s quite taken with hanging on his wall, which she bemoans: “Poor little sheep. He hasn’t much future. Just mutton.” You think the subtext is it’s she who by marrying Wilson will settle for the rest of her life in the same dead end he has.
     Except I don’t buy the ending one bit. It’s atrocious. Are we seriously to believe that after everything we’ve seen, how dutiful the Cluny we’ve come to know is, that she’s to abruptly leave her obligations to both her employer and fiancé? And all because the old lech bought her a pair of black silk stockings? And even if she were to run away with him, what would they live off of? The reality setting in could maybe be a life in poverty grifting a living as Bohemian scenesters. But no. Cut to: he’s overnight a bestselling mystery writer?
     And who could expect him to remain faithful to her? We saw how he nearly sexually assaulted MISS CREAM (great name) in her bedroom. Bolenski’s a chronic philanderer and habitual liar. Methinks the movie really ends in the diegesis point where Cluny is sick to her stomach because Wilson told her she ruined the festivities. And that because high and low class British society are both so cold and ineffectual to treating Cluny as a human, we have to realize how sad reality is. And wonder were she to run off with the only other person who she could have thrillingly satisfying sex is would be using her and throw her away when he’s finished with her, that would be the no future existence, just mutton. Just another piece of meat to him.
     Jennifer Jones as a hot master plumber indefatigably headstrong brimming wide-eyed with joy trying to find her place in life is escapist magic. Cluny Brown is escapist magic. Bolenski gets into the old screwball mistaken identity mixup as a Czech professor war refugee seeking asylum from Nazi occupation. But he’s really just an opportunist out for a good time who’s trying to get laid. This movie is a diversion that isn’t interested in real life conflicts. But Bolenski takes the free ride. And Bolenski forcing himself on Miss Cream is the only way her ANDREW finally proposes. Andrew only recognized his need for Miss Cream out of sexual jealousy and possessiveness. 
     Lubitsch is devious subversive. In Cluny Brown sex shows everything that’s wrong in the world. But just like real life, on the surface it works as an immensely enjoyable farce. And it’s up to us if we want to disregard the ending as a put on or not. I don’t think Cluny ever leaves Carmel Manor. And perhaps more than any other scene I’ve ever seen, when she’s happy having tea with four lumps and crumpets, it’s so perfectly beautiful. Then when they realize she doesn’t belong, that she’s the new maid, it crushes her (and me). “You thought I was somebody else didn’t you? Have I done something wrong?” is when she came to know her place in life. And the movie conveys that feeling. What it’s like to stumble into a point in life where you could be anything you wanted, and then it becomes clear that access to certain areas are off limits. The emotions of processing that. 

Swindler's list

Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942, Leo McCarey) is an insufferable Nazi screwball romance patriotic propaganda piece that asks what if screwball antics were in the service of dealing with WWII? The funniest thing it’s got going for it is the names of the principal characters sounding like the kind of dirty jokes Terry Southern might’ve snuck in: BUTT, TOOL, and LUBE.

     Ginger Rogers is KATHERINE BUTT-SMITH. And her character can be called upon when her country needs her. She sacrifices her diamond bracelet, the man of her dreams, and her own life for the greater good. She even forges her own passport and gives it to a Jewish maid so that the woman and her two children can escape. In this world we’re to accept that sticking the Jewish woman’s photo over her own using chewing gum as adhesive won’t be caught by the Nazis or border checkpoints. 
     Cary Grant is PATRICK O’TOOLE. He seduces Butt-Smith. And there’s a scene early on where he impersonates her tailor and his tape measure springs to attention becoming an unwieldy force of its own. It’s funny to think about whose idea it was to blend harrowing Nazi occupied Europe espionage thriller with lewd screwball farce. Maybe funnier than the finished product. There’s even a scene where the couple are mistaken for Jews (because Katherine still has the maid’s passport) and they end up in a concentration camp. 
     Okay there is a kinda funny bit where O’Toole has to do a radio broadcast out of France telling the USA that Hitler isn’t so bad, where they workshop his script by committee and strongly reject phrases about Hitler using words like “boundaries,” and “will stop at nothing.” Among the plot holes, or at the very least slightly implausible elements, there’s the fact that at no point are the couple cautious about the possibility Von Luber will just kill them until the very last scene where he’s on the same ship attempting to flee as a war criminal to relocate in America. Psyche. Katherine overpowered him and threw him overboard instead.
     And the happy ending is that Von Luber can’t swim. Because we’re all happy he’s dead, as long as there’s a built in disavowal of guilt mechanism. And the message spelled out for us is that the Nazis forbade expressing individual thought, which is unacceptable. And good thing they were defeated. 

The serious side of screwball

There’s something wholesome about Woman of the Year (1942, George Stevens). There’s a scene early on at a baseball stadium that sets the tone for the whole thing. It’s something like a romantic domestic hangout movie. Neither of the two leads are ugly to each other for a change. Nor is there any cynicism, nihilism, or cruel defamation of either of the sexes. Woman of the Year is however a clash of culture, class, and gender screwball romantic platitude (propaganda?) honoring the sanctity of marriage.

     The thing about the rules of the game is when it’s love we’re dealing with, suspension of disbelief can stretch pretty far. I know Tracy and Hepburn were an item, so the chemistry there is palpable. But do I buy TESS HARDING falling for SAM CRAIG? How could a wealthy, polyglot, steeped in international affairs, strong, independent, star columnist fall for a sports writer who takes a cheap shot at her in one of his articles? The absurdity of it is ripe for screwball. There’s maybe even a possible subtle cue it could be read as Tess wants to get laid; Sam Irishes because he wants to marry. Whether or not you view it this way, what follows in a more emphatic comedy of trad gender role-swapping.
     The midpoint is Tess and Sam consummating the marriage. Shortly thereafter, Sam becomes the woman and Tess the man. It all starts when Sam gets his feeling hurt because Tess doesn’t notice his new hat. And then he has to cook dinner for everyone. Then Sam gets over-emotional, and distant because he feels like Tess’s heart isn’t committed to their relationship. What happened? Did sex have anything to do with it?
     Right before they sleep together, Sam is overtly masculine. He is an expert on sports. He’s assertive. Confident. Calm. And right before they make use of their nuptial bed and there’s that screwball misleading appearance gag with the Jew who escapes Hitler in Tess’s bed, Sam invites his riffraff crew over and seems bent on fighting to preserve his tough guy identity. Yet after they’ve shared their night of passion (the cut way before anyone can even come close to glimpsing), Sam becomes femininized. It’s funny then, less far-fetched in today’s modern culture but still fun. I’m just trying to highlight and emphasize the abrupt implausible shifts as characteristic of the screwball nature of Woman of the Year.
     The film’s climax is a set piece that plays around with the way Tess doesn’t know her way around a kitchen, but wants to prove her subservience as a way to reclaim their marriage. The film’s resolution is Sam bashes GERALD, Tess’s (male) secretary over the head with a bottle of champagne that she was to christen an ocean liner with, to show he’s putting an end to her career once and for all so she can be his wife. Or so it seems? The ending is such a mess. You know I’m saying it: screwball context it gets away with it. But even for screwball, this is a big ask. How will they resolve their marriage? There’s no way Tess should quit her career to be a wife. She’s like one of the most successful important, literally “outstanding woman of the year.” 
     I think Woman of the Year is an early example of one of those Hollywood movies that have an ending on the surface to appease the masses and morally just set; but the rest of us know there’s no way that ending is meant to be taken seriously. What happens when we ask ourselves would Hepburn really take a role of an empowered woman who gives up everything to be a docile wife? And if not, why would she take the role? The only way I can reconcile these questions is to imagine she means it as a send up; a put on; the ultimate screwball sentiment being if you actually buy this ending the joke’s on you. All this despite knowing George Stevens would never be complicit in something so subversive. I really do feel bad. I thought for once I’d found a screwball that wasn’t underhanded.

     Unless marriage really meant that much to Hepburn. And the dream doesn't have to correspond to real life. It can be funny. Tender. Sweet. Hopeful. Impossibly perfect.

Sic erat in fatis

Opposites attract. The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges) is equal parts hopeful and cynical about romance. It’s a screwball comedy about the love that strikes between a virgin scientist nepo bookworm and a sexpot grifter career criminal. Yet it does stick with one creative choice that links the two through a similarity. At its midpoint when the couple awake to the reality that their dream of sharing a life together happily ever after has ended, they both suffer equally from the cruelty of it all.

     JEAN’S (Barbara Stanwyck) seduction of HOPSY (Henry Fonda) lays it on pretty thick. The dialogue in which they finish each other’s sentences gets risky dangerous at the part about her wanting to be taken by surprise like a burglar. I won’t spell out what that innuendo means for me but in the context of the scene it works well. 
   Act III is a gaslight melodrama that really throws you off any attempt at guessing what Jean’s motives are. Because we the audience are being conned. There’s this red herring involving why Jean’s alter ego EVE SIDWICH has wedged her way back into Hopsy’s life. Is she imposing herself as a British aristocrat imposter into his social circle in order to humiliate him? Rob him again? Harass him out of spite? What kind of revenge does she have in mind we wonder. Because of that line right before the end of the second act: “Unfinished business. I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” 
     After Hopsy and the Lady Eve are married, she confesses to him. She tells him about several sordid sexual partners she’d had in an elliptical anecdote montage. And we think that makes them even. She wanted to hurt him like he hurt her. But after a tacked on shockingly thrillingly random bumping back into each other encounter we learn what the third act was really all about.
     Jean created Eve as a proxy to get Hopsy to reevaluate her. After having his heart broken by the royal teen slut, the crooked felon hustler in comparison now looks to him ideal. So The Lady Eve is telling us a man can forgive being swindled out of vast sums, lied to, used, and tricked, but not a woman who’s slept around alot. It’s funny in a screwball context. So its moral is: whatever it is keep it to yourself if you want to build a relationship on trust. 
     Lastly, I don’t know why but I’ve always hated Charles Coburn as the COL character inordinately. Like just how this grifter family is out to scam the poor Henry Fonda character just aggravates me because I have to see it coming and he can’t maybe. Also I’ve always liked Coburn in anything else I’ve seen him in. Which brings me to ask myself how I feel at the midpoint when Jean gets busted and subsequently broken up with. Something that always works in movies is having a character vow to reveal some immoral spot from their past to a loved one, and the other party finding out just a little too soon. I know she’s good, which is why this plot point probably works so well. So can we really buy the ending? Or do we buy it because we’ve been conned and don’t realize it? In which case would that also possibly be intentional? To on some level equate falling in love or being moved emotionally by a love story as falling for a grift?

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.

That's not my baby

Bachelor Mother (1939, Garson Kanin) is an unwed mother pro-life screwball comedy about child rearing that romanticizes starting a family. Thus far it also might be the screwball with the most instances of misleading appearances leading to false assumptions. 

     The premise is so very screwball. Temp gets let go. Picks up a baby left on a doorstep. Gets hired on fulltime and given a raise because of it. Later there’ll be another time deception gets her her job back. When she fabricates a history of domestic assault pointing to her temple and saying “coffee pot.” What can I say? I love laughing at the darkest things that aren’t funny. I love comedies that can make something not funny funny.

     Another of the elements I define the screwball by is class conflict. It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra) uses its narrative as a platform to exhort us about it. And we get plenty of a variation of class conflict, which is the Cinderella rags to riches fantasy. But for me the one I best relate to is the impossibility of vertical upwards class mobility. Bachelor Mother is set in motion with the understanding that it’s only a matter of time before POLLY PARRISH (Ginger Rogers) and DAVID MERLIN (David Niven) fall in love. (Okay first though let’s not even mention that this is also yet another screwball about a low level employee marrying her boss.) But into the second act at the New Year’s Eve party what does that say about vertical class mobility that David chooses to have Polly pass herself off as someone who can’t speak English (daughter of a Swedish manufacturer) instead of risking her being unable to converse with the party guests. Of course how could she possibly socialize with those above her? She’s merely a peasant. 

     As Bachelor Mother exists in the world of screwball, it’s a wonderful example too of illusion becoming reality. David using Polly to pretend she’s his date turns into them becoming romantically matched after having some chemistry. Plot twist is Polly pretending the baby is hers in turn turns off David. (But only briefly. We know he’s to come back around.) Seriously their first kiss on New Year’s Eve in that huge crowd all singing in New York is such a moving uplifting American sentimental flourish.

     For its time, this movie has a very impressive effective tracking shot of a Donald Duck toy falling down the stairs that tells us David has realized he’s in love with Polly that is quite stunning. This film strikes a balance between clever, compassionate, and ambitious. And it’s summed up best in that last moment David hugs her and when she asks him if she still thinks he’s the mother of the baby and he says “of course,” she slyly delivers that “ha ha” is such a perfect denouement.

Phone worshippers

What joy films from this era bring me. Midnight (1939, Mitchell Leisen) is an identity theft screwball comedy about social mobility that’s hopeful, life-affirming, sweet on its surface, but underneath one of the most bleak confections to hold a shattered mirror up to human nature. And maybe I’m the problem here. The reason this material connects with me so is because I don’t believe the possibility of upward vertical class integration exists. I read this movie as reinforcing an inferiority complex. What’s more important is that Midnight can be read as the cabbie looms lurking around every corner as a specter, a grim reaper to drag EVE PEABODY (Claudette Colbert) back where she belongs lest she think she can rise above her station.

     I’m big lately on what I perceive as one of cinema’s greatest strengths, which is communicating emotion. Emotions that can’t be put into words. Emotions that your literal mind can’t figure out through reason. Take Eve’s crashing the party when she’s arrived in Paris. The hostess makes an announcement that the pawn ticket of a woman named Eve Peabody has been tendered as counterfeit admission and asks for the culprit to identify herself. But Eve keeps silent. In the hotseat squirming. The suspense she’ll be revealed as imposter. This is what it can feel like for some when they feel like they don’t fit in socially. The feeling is authentic and conveys this so well. Is it all in her head? Is it all in our head? But it gets even better. We’re in psychological horror territory when her lies have her cornered and she’s about to be busted going into a room that isn’t hers. But the key works. And when she goes inside it’s so scary. Dark. Shadows. She keeps asking who’s there? This is what it can feel like if you actually make it in. Dangerous. But somehow a key that shouldn’t have worked did. For you. But technically it’s breaking and entering. And there are laws against that. You will pay.
     The character work in Midnight screams real life fodder. Eve is emblematic of a woman who’s hot, young, and inherently stubborn about accepting anything less than a life full of luxury, wealth, opulence, fame, and parties. Everything social media uses to ensnare its target demo with today in real life. Is this a toxic stereotype? Doubtful. Who’s saying there’s anything wrong with it? It’s aspirational. Eve is a gold digger by her own self admission. She identifies as such. That hits. She’s supposedly in love with the Don Ameche character but won’t let herself be with him because what she most desires is a future in pursuit of materialism that he clashes with. 
     So when the film has them end up with each other happily ever after, I think it’s bunk. It feels like moralizing. Like Midnight is telling us there’s no way she could have had any other life than with this cabbie because they’re equally matched because they’re from the same lower class. Because they’re both fakers and can’t keep going without giving up the false illusion. Hollywood owes us more. The fairytale can replace reality. In Hollywood, but not in real life. And that’s what makes the ending sad. We don’t get the Hollywood ending we get the real life ending. Also come to think of it that’s what makes the ending of Some Like It Hot (1959, Billy Wilder) the best ending for a comedy. The audacity to subversively defiantly refuse to accede to the hoax.

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.

I'm in love with love

The Awful Truth (1937, Leo McCary) is a divorce screwball comedy that flourishes as a romantic ideal wherein adultery and dishonesty can make for a great marriage. It’s got a message too: in marriage, if you’ve lost faith, you’ve lost everything. Yet in this film, this married couple prove the exception to that rule.

     Theodora Goes Wild (1936, Richard Boleslawski) established Irene Dunne’s screwball vitality. Enter Cary Grant. (Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are the funniest actors and have that affected manner of speaking that feels so far removed from real life but precisely why I love them.) Throwing Irene Dunne and Cary Grant together in the whole Manhattan formal tuxedos, gowns, and posh penthouses milieu delivers more production value than any billion dollar IP cashgrab ever will. They have a tangible onscreen chemistry.

     The narrative opens with a custody case for their dog. How screwball is that? Wait is it absurd or do people really do that? Nevermind. Who cares? Thusfar I’ve been touting the fundamental elements in screwball are deception, mistaken identities, misleading appearances, false assumptions; so, a divorce between a couple who’ve chronically lied and cheated on each other makes for a marriage made in screwball heaven. When our story begins, there’s 59 days left until the divorce is final, the ol’ ticking clock plot device. That’s 59 days for them to realize how perfect they are for each other, as we do. They’re too charming and cool for anyone else.

     Rebound is the bunk. Ralph Bellamy plays this hick whom LUCY WARRINER (Dunne) has no business with whom JERRY WARRINER (Grant) derisively refers to as Buffalo Bill, ongoing gags poking fun at the Midwest. Buffalo Bill’s mother in law hears the tea about Lucy being promiscuous and subsequently disapproves of their engagement. So after this plot twist we have to wonder how can Lucy and Jerry wind up back together if they’ve already failed at their marriage? 

     The answer is when Grant has that amazing pratfall out of his chair in the concert hall and we laugh, as does Lucy. The other thing I’ve been touting about screwball is making each other laugh is true love. Now we’re past the point of no return. (Oh yeah I forgot to mention that scene with Grant whipping that dude’s ass with jiu jitsu. Yes really.) So we get the key sentiment of the movie when Lucy says “I’m still in love with that crazy lunatic and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

     Preceding the Act II break the sequence with Dunne hiding the hat and the dog after it is iconic. In real life I don’t even like dogs. I love certain dogs. MR. SMITH is one of them. When that dog finds the hat it exceeds beyond my capacity to imagine what a scene can do with a cute animal.

There’s the 2 men in her bedroom farce that takes us into Act III. And here, when Irene Dunne has to masquerade as Grant’s sister, combining the whole Dixeibelle thing with her quasi Grant impersonation wins her the benefit of the doubt and prevents us from ever again doubting her well-earned comedic status again. And the plot twist affording her the opportunity to deliver such a hysterical turn is adept because she’s getting back at Jerry for his Buffalo Bill hijinks by sabotaging his rebound. So where are we headed? Will this be a spite marriage once they inevitably reconcile? Probs. Also very screwball here drunk driving, taunting and scamming the police. Anyways. The last scene in that cabin is hot. We know when Dunne in bed gives that inviting come hither look sex is what’s to save the marriage. 

     The black cat on the bed is harbinger. The faulty lock Lucy says is “not so practical but I guess it’ll serve its purpose” is metaphor for infidelity. The film’s saying bad luck and society’s definition of immorality can’t keep us apart. 

     Big problem with the ending is do people change? If they lied and cheated on each other in their marriage, what led to that? Furthermore what did they do to address it? What’s to say it won’t happen again? Or do they care? I know I know. They’re selling us the dream. True love overcomes. But why can’t I shake the feeling this time it won’t last? This narrative seems cynical like because this couple failed at marriage that makes them an ideal match for marriage? In screwball anything goes. Don’t overthink it like me.

     

One should always listen to someone when they say goodbye because sometimes they're really saying farewell

Stage Door (1937, Gregory La Cava) is an ebullient woman’s picture comedy-melodrama tearjerker that conceals its darker subject matter which it gradually reveals as an indictment of systemic abuse by the combine of the theatrical scene in New York threshing away the many hopeful innocents that seek success in its blades. It’s also got a boarder who wears a cat drooped down her neck like a shawl. 

     Wake up. Finally a real star. Kate Hepburn kills. She’s got the force of a man but she’s not masculine like a say, Rosalind Russell. Hepburn plays TERRY RANDALL, new girl moving into the Footlights Club, a theatrical boarding house for broke aspiring actresses, and it’s full of ‘em. A young Ann Miller is so cute in this prototypical Mulholland Drive. Plucky Ginger Rogers holds her own as Hepburn’s nemesis. My empathy pours out for Lucille Ball as the girl who has to go on dates with some lumber men from Seattle who knew her from her childhood whose company she suffers because she needs the dinners they pay for. 
     The volley of dialogue fired off in this place is pandemonium and you think you’re in for a treat. But no. It turns into something else entirely.
 
The other half of Stage Door emerges when Adolphe Menjou as TONY POWELL turns out to be this predatory casting couch impresario who makes you miss Oscar Jaffe. Great detail in its poignancy is after Ginger Rogers’ character sobs her way out the door when we see Powell immediately begin flipping through his little black book.
     But it’s really this KAY character who overshadows the rest of the picture. Every time I watch this movie, as soon as Kay walks in that door for the first time the way her light is dimming to a flicker weary struggling to stay hopeful, I cry. I also cry when we first meet MISS LUTHER because of her age and how she still hasn’t given up and how she pathetically keeps her rumpled theater notices from some long forgotten distant past. Stage Door is a three hanky picture. Kay floats through in some melancholy fugue as if she belongs in a different movie altogether. It’s so sad that quick line never mentioned again or elaborated on when Kay says “except someone I’ll never go back to” back home traumatic pain. Although Miss Randall steals her part, it’s more complex than that. Because once Kay took a part from some other actress. And Miss Randall didn’t earn her opportunity, it was bought for her through nepotism. Kay and Terry are both such great examples of an active protagonist. In this movie neither of them would mean anything to us without without the other. That’s impressive writing.
     Can’t shake the haunting sequence where Kay walks up that gothic lit staircase hearing voices. Kay’s broken. Her mental illness is pure psychological horror. And the climax is heavy. Devastating. “What’s more important than a career?” says that louse Powell. Stage Door is really about young women’s hopes and dreams. It’s really about our own hopes and dreams. And these are the types of movies that know how to be the most heart wrenching. When Powell says "oh she's still around" about Kay that's such a punch in the gut. It stays with you. Yet again from this period it makes one ask how many of these comedies end right back where they started? We get the message.