[Screwball Sunday #2] Shaping Screwball

Political and cultural influences

Nov 10, 2024

Catch up on the previous instalment of the Screwball Sunday series.

[Screwball Sunday #1] Defining the Genre

November 3, 2024

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The introductory post last week discussed how screwball comedy emerged as a result of both the Great Depression and the introduction of the Hays Code, consequences of both reflected in the key elements of screwball. Today, I will be sharing a more in-depth view into the political and cultural influences on screwball as well as how the genre was received by the public at the time. Just like last week, this instalment of the Screwball Sunday series features discussion questions and a list of recommended films so please reach out with your comments and thoughts on the topic – I love talking screwball!

The Great Depression

At the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, a decade of wealth and excess, a large sell-off of stocks began in mid-October of 1929, following a volatile September and the early signs of economic troubles that the volatility signified. On the 24th of October, the New York Stock Exchange crashed and subsequently plunged the world into proverbial darkness. Between 1929 and 1932, the worldwide GDP fell by 15% with unemployment in the US rising to 23%. It comes as no surprise then that the moviegoing audiences at the time needed comfort to cope with those difficult times.

Comedy was not necessarily at the forefront initially but by the time the mid-1930s rolled around, the economic hardships had been around long enough that the general population was able to laugh at the situation at hand and happy endings came as a way to provide hope and reassure the audiences.1 While there might not be a definitive answer on what the first screwball comedy was as the genre gradually emerged and evolved from existing comedy, many will agree it to be Three-Cornered Moon from 1933.

Appropriate to the time it emerged in, screwball comedy’s initial objective was to mock the wealthy.2 This was perhaps driven by jealousy or the sheer fascination with how the 1% lives but it isn’t surprising or even highly specific to that time period given what we know now about the successes of modern reality shows following celebrities or the constant flaunting of luxury products on social media that is so prevalent today. That said, the desire to mock the wealthy was undoubtedly heightened by the economic circumstances at the time.

Three-Cornered Moon (1933) depicts a wealthy family losing their wealth in the Great Depression. It Happened One Night (1934) depicts a runaway heiress travelling and bickering with a working class man. My Man Godfrey (1936) tells a tale of a wealthy socialite hiring a homeless man as her butler. Fifth Avenue Girl (1939) features a line stating “rich people are just poor people with money.” These examples are plentiful in the screwball genre. And, in all cases, these films aim to reconcile the different social classes and humanise the wealthy in the eyes of the moviegoing audiences.

Knowing that Hollywood worked with the US government on propaganda during the two World Wars,3 it is easy to make the conclusion that the need to depict the unity between the upper and the lower class stemmed from the ongoing economic struggles and a dissatisfaction with the extremely wealthy coming from the working class, making this approach to filmmaking an obvious propagandistic choice.

The Hays Code

The Hays Code, or the Motion Picture Production Code, was a set of self-imposed censorship guidelines that was applied to virtually all motion pictures produced in the United States between 1934 and 1968. The code prohibited studios from depicting anything not suitable for all audiences4 – such as profanity, graphic violence, nudity and sex, and more – and was ultimately sunset in favour of the rating system we use today. The Code came at a somewhat of a weird time in American film when many films directly opposed the requirements of the code and revolved around topics like sexuality or crime and prohibition.5 Female characters enjoyed increasing freedom from social constraints and expectations in the pre-Code era. They were self-determined and independent, moving to big cities for work, allowed to live out their sexuality freely and naturally, shifting their relationships with men on the screen.6 With the Code, even if it was originally optional and studios opted in voluntarily, the way certain characters (i.e. women) and storylines were allowed to be depicted changed.

The introduction of the Code forced filmmakers to work around it to be able to tell their stories in full. And with romance and the romantic comedy genre, lots of adjustments needed to be made. Enter screwball.

While some of the absurdity and humour in screwball comedy came from the need for comedic relief in the time of the Great Depression, a large part of how the genre depicted relationship dynamics and how it created the so-called ‘battle of the sexes’ came as a direct result of the Code. Films in the genre are riddled with sexual innuendos and the banter between the female and the male leads is used to create sexual tension. At their core, screwball comedies are films about sex, without any depictions of it.

Despite voicing my opinion that I regard It Happened One Night (1934) as a romantic comedy rather than a screwball comedy last week, the film happens to be the first one that comes to mind when thinking about the clever use of innuendos to bypass the Code. When the two leads find themselves forced to share a room with two twin beds – the 1930s version of the ‘there was only one bed’ trope – they come up with a solution of hanging a sheet in between their beds in an attempt to ensure some privacy and preserve their virtue. The sheet becomes an ongoing gag throughout the film – the sheet playfully being referred to as the Walls of Jericho – until the final scene when the audience is presented with a shot of the house exterior as the Walls of Jericho come tumbling down inside. Later films, well past the era of screwball, also rely on similar techniques to depict sex under the constraints of the Hays Code. Just think about the final shot of North by Northwest (1959) or the fireworks scene in To Catch a Thief (1955).

Among my personal favourite films of all time is Bringing Up Baby (1938), one of the four collaborations between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, riddled with sexual innuendos and dialogue that makes you wonder how it even got past the Code. A clever example of wordplay in this film that has since become quite famous is Cary Grant’s improv in the scene when his character, wearing a woman’s – Hepburn’s character’s – robe, opens the front door to find her aunt standing there. She asks why he is wearing the robe and he responds with “I just went gay all of a sudden.” The term ‘gay’ used to mean ‘happy’ or ‘cheerful’ which makes sense in the context of the scene but Grant uses it here to play into its other meaning, sneaking in a reference to homosexuality which was something the Code prohibited. This also happens to be the first time ever that the word was used on screen to refer to being homosexual.

Hints of and references to homosexuality were present in other films in the genre. My Favorite Wife (1940) revolves around a woman who returns home, years after she was presumed dead, only to find her husband (played by Cary Grant) remarried. In a surprising turn of events, it is revealed that she spent her time away in the company of another man (played by Randolph Scott). What unfolds from there is a love triangle that effectively becomes a square when Scott joins the ensemble but the dialogue and body language throughout insinuate that under different circumstances, it would perhaps be Grant’s and Scott’s characters running off together in the end, something very easily imaginable given their close personal relationship off-screen. Similarly, in His Girl Friday (1940), Rosalind Russell’s character – playing the ex-wife of Cary Grant’s character – tells him about her new fiancé early in the film to which he responds with “sounds like a guy I ought to marry.”

Infidelity was another topic the Code prohibited, stating that it must not be explicitly treated, justified, or presented attractively.7 This ultimately resulted in the rise of the so-called comedy of remarriage, allowing filmmakers to hint at infidelity but not explore its real outcomes. His Girl Friday (1940) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) are some of the most popular with this trope as is The Awful Truth (1937), which ends with a scene where the lead couple are sleeping in two adjacent bedrooms, separated only by a door with a broken latch, reminiscent of the Walls of Jericho in It Happened One Night (1934).

What the Hays Code did, as is evident in these examples, was force creativity in order to skirt around what would have been considered sensitive topics. This led to the emergence of specific genres and tropes – such as the comedy of remarriage – as well as an increased focus on dialogue and double entendres to convey sexual tension or what would have been considered prohibited activities. The restrictions of the era influenced not only the screwball genre but allowed screwball to set a precedent for handling sex in storylines for decades to come.

World War II

With World War II came the demise of screwball comedy. Not only did economic circumstances improve but the involvement of the United States in the war led, as previously mentioned, to Hollywood studios shifting their focus in order to support the federal government’s propagandistic efforts and reinforce American values through their productions.8 Similarly to how screwball comedy came to be as a direct consequence of a major global event, it ended with one. Its ties to the Great Depression which heavily influenced many of its key elements were ultimately its downfall. However, this is not to say that the end of screwball comedy was harsh and sudden. It was quite the opposite. The genre, as it is defined, fizzled out similarly to how it gradually evolved in the first place, with no clear date or film that would have been the genre’s last. While comedies after the mid-1940s were no longer a sum of the key elements of screwball, they still featured them individually. As mentioned earlier, Hitchcock frequently used sexual innuendos to work around the Code, a technique that was prominently featured in screwball comedy. Later films, like It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947), continued to depict the differences between social classes and the so-called battle of the sexes remains a prominent theme in romantic comedies even now.

The fourth instalment of the Screwball Sunday series, available starting November 24th, will further dive into what happened to screwball comedy after the 1940s and how its influences continue to be reflected in modern cinema.

Public Reception

If you take a look at the American Film Institute’s list of 100 greatest films of all time,9 you’ll notice several titles that have been mentioned in this and the previous instalment of this series. AFI’s list of the funniest American movies of all time10 features even more screwball comedies. And, if you take a look at the AFI’s list of the greatest actors,11 screwball stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant rank at the very top. It is easy to conclude that the most well known screwball comedy films enjoy high critical praise and popularity among cinephiles. Or at least they do today.

At the time these films were released, the public perception was vastly different. Take Bringing Up Baby (1938) for example. The film featuring both Hepburn and Grant, received positive response from the critics, many of the major outlets – with the exception of The New York Times – praising the leads’ performances and Howard Hawks’s direction.12 However, the public response had been different. Just three months after the film’s premiere, The Hollywood Reporter published an article by the Independent Theatre Owners Association that listed several major Hollywood stars, Katharine Hepburn included, as “box office poison.”13 Hepburn and Grant’s other 1938 feature, Holiday, saw equally lacklustre box office numbers. And yet, years later, Bringing Up Baby (1938) is praised not only as one of the greatest examples of screwball comedy but also for the individual performances from both leads and their undeniable chemistry. In fact, on a personal level, I will never not be sad that Hepburn and Grant only made four films together and I know many cinephiles today share my sentiment.

But why didn’t the film resonate with the public? After all, so many of its themes were specifically tailored to appeal to moviegoing audiences at the time. Howard Hawks himself claimed years later that the problem with the film may have been that it had no normal people in it which may have been on the wrong side of too much for regular moviegoers.14

Similarly, His Girl Friday (1940), another Cary Grant feature and a film that film schools around the world today use as the example of screwball comedy, saw contrasting reactions from critics at the time of its release. The New York Times complained about the strenuous dialogue with little value while describing the films characters as caricatures15 but Variety praised the film’s amusing dialogue and the sexual tension that stemmed from it.16

While screwball comedy and its most popular representatives are critically acclaimed for a reason, perhaps some of the audiences at the peak of the genre saw right through its propaganda. The genre itself came as a way to comfort the general public and create some escapism during the time of economic struggle. Given that this is fairly obvious when watching screwball comedy in hindsight, it also shouldn’t be surprising that some audiences noticed this even at the time of the release, and it should be even less surprising that they wouldn’t have been happy with the propaganda which ultimately led to contrasting reviews and box office flops despite the quality of the material.

Discussion Questions

Can you think of any modern films – comedy or otherwise – that depict the battle between economic classes in a similar manner that screwball comedy does?
Consider the ways in which filmmakers had to skirt around the Hays Code. Do you think the innovation it brought in terms of dialogue and emphasis on clever wordplay is something modern films lack?
What are some critically acclaimed films you don’t like – and vice versa?