A Love Letter to the Screwball Comedy
By Film and TV Editor Mia Tobin Power
Over the last year, I’ve gotten really into screwball comedies - a cinematic genre from the 1930s and 1940s that precedes the modern romantic comedy. In an attempt to learn more about film history, I decided I would watch Bringing Up Baby. I discovered something that I’m ashamed I didn’t know before: Old Hollywood films can be really funny. But I also found that the female lead in the film was strong-willed and had agency; she was the pursuer in the relationship. I watched more screwball comedies, and I realised that they all starred smart, resourceful, and determined female characters. What surprised me most of all was that in nearly every film I watched, the female lead was much more important than the male lead - the story was usually told from her perspective, we learned more about her family and backstory, and she was certainly more memorable.
Of course, most contemporary heterosexual romantic comedies do tell the female character’s side of the story, but how she is expected to act in the story is different. Usually, the film’s conflict is the fact that she is “messy”, and her arc is supposed to end with her settling down with a man who magically improves her life and personality. Or else, the conflict revolves around whether she can “have it all” or not - and often, she can’t, and she chooses romance over her career. (Anna Bogutskaya’s excellent book Unlikeable Female Characters dives deep into these and many other tropes in TV and film.) These rom-coms can be fun to watch too, but I found it refreshing that the female characters in screwball comedies don’t adhere to these tropes as much. I enjoyed watching these characters take control of their stories and pursue their desires. I wished that more people knew about these films, about how the modern rom-coms we love wouldn’t exist without them. So, I’m taking the first opportunity I get to tell you all about them.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood was governed by the Motion Picture Production Code, commonly known as the Hays Code (after William H. Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America). The Code was introduced in 1930 as a response to several scandals that rocked Hollywood in the 1920s, which led some religious, civic, and political organisations to question the morality of the film industry. The Code was essentially a list of regulations a film had to abide by, and which prohibited profanity, sex, violence, and crime from being shown on screen. It forced filmmakers to censor themselves, but they found ways around these rules. One of the most iconic characteristics of a screwball comedy is its witty, fast-paced dialogue, which is intended to stand-in for and symbolise sexual tension. It is heartwarming that artists found a creative way around the Hays Code, which led them to create an original aspect to the work that still lives on today - recently, Greta Gerwig cited the screwball comedies His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story as influences on her film Barbie, due to the rhythm of their dialogue.
It Happened One Night is considered to be the first screwball comedy. It stars Claudette Colbert as Ellie Andrews, a runaway socialite, and Clark Gable as Peter Warne, a recently-unemployed journalist who wants the exclusive on Ellie’s story. At the beginning of the film, Ellie runs away from her father in Florida to meet her new husband in New York, whom she has married against her father’s wishes. Along the way, she meets Peter. While Peter is the co-lead of the film, it is really about Ellie. Her rebellion against her father sets the story in motion, and while initially she wants nothing to do with Peter, ultimately, she confesses her love for him first. Even though Ellie and Peter get married at the end, most of the film suggests an ambivalence towards the institution of marriage that later screwball comedies would expand upon. The official ceremony for Ellie’s marriage to her first husband Westley at the end of the film devolves into a farce, with Ellie leaving Westley at the altar and running to her car to reunite with Peter. Ellie and Peter’s marriage is officiated off-screen; instead, the symbolic dismantling of the makeshift barrier between their two beds (constructed while they were travelling together to protect their privacy) tells us more about this new stage of their relationship than a wedding ceremony could. While later screwball comedies would present sharper critiques of gender roles, the film is notable for its engagement with class and its exploration of the relationships between men and women in society.
I couldn’t write an article on the screwball comedy without talking about Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, who starred together in two of the genre’s biggest films: Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story. In both films, Hepburn’s character has the power. In Bringing Up Baby, her character Susan is confident and determined, while Grant’s character David exists in a perpetual state of stress and confusion. This film is the perfect example of a pattern that appears in most screwball comedies: the male leads (and especially the female lead’s new love interest, if there is one) are generally clumsy and foolish, while the female leads are more interesting and appear more complex.
The Philadelphia Story is about Tracy Lord, a socialite whose second wedding is infiltrated by her ex-husband (played by Grant) and a journalist (played by James Stewart, in one of my favourite performances by him). The night before her wedding, Tracy has a brief romantic moment with the journalist, Mike. Her fiancé, believing that she has cheated on him right before their wedding, criticises her using coded misogynistic language, suggesting that he expected her to conform to a certain ideal of womanhood. Tracy refuses to accept his vision of how she should behave and calls off their engagement. But all the wedding guests are waiting, and she decides to get married anyway, choosing her ex-husband, Dexter, to be her groom. The ending of the film, wherein the divorced couple get remarried seemingly randomly, ridicules the very concepts of marriage and divorce.
The Philadelphia Story can be considered a “comedy of remarriage” - a film wherein the characters get divorced, then remarried, to avoid the depiction of extramarital affairs, which were forbidden by the Hays Code. Similarly, The Awful Truth (also starring Cary Grant) questions the institution of marriage by employing a plot mechanic in which the two leads are waiting out the last few days before their divorce is finalised. They are both married and divorced simultaneously, allowing for the female lead, Lucy, to become engaged to another man without it technically being an extramarital affair (although the reason the two characters get divorced in the first place is because they suspect each other of having affairs. It’s complicated). Lucy and her soon-to-be-ex-husband Jerry reconcile at the end, just before their divorce is finalised, again implying that the institution of marriage is arbitrary - at least for these characters.
His Girl Friday, one of my favourite screwball comedies, is also a “comedy of remarriage” (and again, stars Cary Grant, the king of the genre). It features possibly the fastest-paced dialogue out of any of the films I’ve seen. The two leads, Hildy and Walter, are journalists. Many characters in screwball comedies are journalists, likely because it provides an excuse as to why they move and talk so fast: they need to figure out the story and publish it as quickly as possible. At the beginning of the film, Hildy has already left her job and plans to remarry and live as a housewife. Walter, intent on winning her back, persuades her to investigate one more story before she leaves for her new life in Albany. At the end, Hildy does decide to remarry Walter (her new love interest is especially boring). But more emphasis is placed on Hildy’s decision to continue her career as a journalist than on remarrying Walter. There is relatively little romantic tension between the two characters throughout the film; the real love story is between Hildy and her career, which she is shown to be excellent at.
There is more to the screwball comedy that I could ever talk about here; I also really like Mr Smith Goes to Washington, which is simultaneously a screwball comedy and a political drama. The genre is so fascinating because it blends a specific kind of humour with examinations of gender roles, female agency, and marriage. Watching a screwball comedy, you catch glimpses of the rom-com tropes we as a contemporary audience know so well. You understand where they came from, and how we got to where we are now.
