Screwball Comedies
Screwball comedies were made for only a short time, relatively speaking, in the history of American film. They flourished under the Great Depression and went into their final phase just as the United States entered World War II. Using social and sexual role inversion, screwball comedy commented on life during the Depression. The rich can be quirky yet still hold the capability to be "regular people"; wealth and true love is attainable by the very poor; and most importantly, transcendence of class, sexual and other differences is shown to be possible. While their usage of sex and class reversal, as a comic way to deal with a changing American society the best screwball comedies are ones that still have resonance for our modern society. Many of these films are unsentimental yet extremely telling and oddly sympathetic about the way that people organize both their inner psyches and social spheres, about sexual roles, and most of all, about how people fall in love. Some of them wo!uld later provide dark visions of relations between people, and between people and the society that they live in. Carole Lombard, screwball's brightest female star, began, after her prototype Twentieth Century (1934), to accrue critical acclaim as a s
In all ways, It Happened One Night was a case of serendipity: a truly happy accident. Usually the former is a catalyst for the latter, from a somewhat stuffy fellow to a bubblehead who has learned to treat life and love as one big adventure. Frank Capra, son of immigrant Italians, had previously made some melodramas with new star Barbara Stanwyck, and was working at "Poverty Row" studio Columbia when a cycle of "bus stories" appeared in pulp fiction form. Occasionally a filmmaker attempts to look at cross-racial paring, such as in Zebrahead, Jungle Fever, and Mississippi Masala, but happy endings are no longer guaranteed, and these films are hardly screwball comedies. The Screwball Comedy Films: A History and Filmogrphy, 1934-1942. Thayer, had decided to punish one of his stars for the gall of asking for a raise and so Clark Gable would also add to the charm of It Happened One Night. On the way she bumps into a newspaperman Peter Warne, who's just been fired from his job, quite tipsily- a man rebelling against authority himself (his boss at the newspaper. Byrge, Duane, and Robert Milton Miller. Manchester, England and Manchester Univ. Working with Gable would increase her own reputation, and Kendall suggests "she was lucky that Capra saw through her charm to the intelligence that controlled it", and that it created another dimension to the screwball comedienne, a woman whose intelligence and cunning laid beneath all the wackiness. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**BibliographyAmerican Cinema: Romantic Comedy. A good example of such a transformative fluffhead is Lombard in My Man Godfrey , an immature but sweet-natured girl who rescues hobo William Powell from the city dump, installing hi!m as her family's butler and then proceeding to fall in love with him.
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Acceptance Essays
