The Screwball Comedy and Frank Capras It Happened

‘The Screwball Comedy’ and Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night Genre Definition and a Film Analysis

What is the screwball comedy? • No general agreement among film historians on what constituted a screwball comedy or what films belong to the category. • General agreement, however, is about the period in which the genre prospered - between 1934 and 1938.

What is the screwball comedy? • The genre began with Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and ended with Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938)

What is the screwball comedy? • One constant in this genre - the teaming up of a male star and a female star, who are entangled in love and the centre of comical spectacle. • Some tendencies among film historians in understanding and identifying the genre, screwball comedy. • Lewis Jacobs in his The Rise of the American Film (1939) - sociological discussion on the frustration and energy found screwball comedies. Jacobs ascribes it to the mood of the depression era.

What is the screwball comedy? • Andrew Bergman in his We’re in Money (1971) saw screwball comedies as a reactionary genre which was an attempt to clear up and purify rawer and more bawdry trends in comedy opened up by the Marx Brothers. Replaced humour.

What is the screwball comedy? • Griffith and Mayer in their The Movies find in the genre a new image of courtship and marriage combined with slapstick or violent elements. This is attributed to the frustration felt during the economic crisis. • While acknowledging the genre elements identified by film historians, Sarris denies their sociological connection to the social milieu of the period, the Depression era in the 1930 s.

What is the screwball comedy? • Andrew Sarris approach the genre not from the ideological but stylistic angle. • The screwball comedy is the sex comedy without sex. • Constants for screwball comedies • Hardly no children and no babies. Comedies of courtship with propensities for quarrels and bickerings

Presence of talented comediennes with a variety of trick voices, insinuating mannerisms, and unearthly beauty. Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, and Barbara Stanwyck

What is the screwball comedy? • The only actor indispensable to the genre - Cary Grant with shy, nervous detachment and clownish behaviour. He was often paired with Katharine Hepburn.

It Happened One Night • Generally considered one of the greatest romantic comedies and the first screwball comedy. An escapist film about an unlikely pairing of a mismatched couple - a recently-fired newspaper man (Gable) and a wealthy heiress (Colbert) on a run.

It Happened One Night • An unexpected box office hit and won five Academy Awards, unrivaled till One Flew over the Cuckoos’ Nest and then The Silence of the Lambs were awarded with five Oscars.

It Happened One Night • Frustrated couple Gable and Colbert – Frustration comes from the fact that sex is removed though it is a sex comedy. • Debates on the arts of dunking, hitchhiking and riding piggyback. • Romantic leads get laugh on their own. • What other generic