The Projectionist Presents : The Screwball Soufflé
It's the Planet of the Japes today in The Projection Room
as the Projectionist salutes screwball comedies
from their golden hurrah in the late 1930s - early 1940s
The 1940s was a great age for the jocose film; the preceding decade was canonized with one of the unlikeliest pieces of comic casting in Hollywood but one that was reasonably received with contemporaneous audiences. 'Garbo Laughs' declared the publicity for Ninotchka in which the dramatic queen of the screen fell under the influence of champagne, Paree and Melvyn Douglas. And after that, little was sacred.
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Some of the more memorable Forties comedies were imported Broadway hits. In The Philadelphia Story (1940) Katherine Hepburn resumed the role she had created on the stage as the rich socialite torn between suitors Cary Grant and James Stewart. Another great stage comedy Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) would famously exploit Cary Grant's comedy chops, though in the same film, Raymond Massey took the role Boris Karloff had played on the stage as the most monstrous of the family of poisoners. Broadway was also the source of The Man Who Came To Dinner (1941), a sophisticated comedy that satirized the vitriolic theater critic Alexander Woolcott. In the same period, Howard Hawks and George Stevens, two influential directors noted for their work in a variety of genres, made some of the classic comedies of the Forties. In Stevens' Talk of the Town, Cary Grant played a suspected arsonist and Jean Arthur tried to cover up for him. Stevens also made The More the Merrier (1943), a comedy in which Jean Arthur played a girl sharing her flat with two chaps. Hawks, who displayed a fine gift for comedy, made Ball of Fire in 1941, capitalizing on the comic panache of Barbara Stanwyck's portrayal of Sugarpuss O'Shea to Gary Cooper's milquetoast Professor Bertram Potts. He was a philologist investigating the art of 'hep-cat' slang and she was an exotic dancer. In the end both learned invaluable lessons about the ways of the world.
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| Cooper's a philologist without words as Stanwyck pussyfoots around. |
At the end of the decade, the screwball comedy reached its apotheosis with Hawks I Was A Male War Bride (1949) in which Cary Grant played a Frenchman and later in the film tried to pass himself off as a US servicewoman. In that same year, George Cukor made Adam's Rib in which Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were married attorneys who found themselves at opposite sides of the same case. For all the triumphs of sophisticated comedy, however, the genre still retained its essential touch of zaniness as was exemplified in the extraordinarily eccentric Hellzapoppin' (1942)
