Screwball Comedy

  • Howard Hawks – Twentieth Century (1934)

    1931-1940ClassicsComedyHoward HawksScrewball ComedyUSA

    Synopsis:
    Broadway director Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) is a bigger ham than most actors, but through sheer drive and talent he is able to build a successful career. When one of his discoveries, Lily Garland (Carole Lombard), rises to stardom and heeds the call of Hollywood, Oscar begins a career slide. He hits the skids and seems on his way out, until he chances to meet Lily again, on a train ride aboard the Twentieth Century Limited. Oscar pulls out all the stops to re-sign his former star, but it’s a battle – because Lily, who is as temperamental as Oscar is, wants nothing to do with her former mentor.Read More »

  • George Stevens – Vivacious Lady (1938)

    George Stevens1931-1940ComedyScrewball ComedyUSA

    College town life gets turned upside down after a button-down botany professor secretly weds a sizzling night-club singer.Read More »

  • William A. Seiter – A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)

    William A. Seiter1941-1950ComedyRomanceScrewball ComedyUSA
    A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)
    A Lady Takes a Chance (1943)

    Synopsis:
    A New York bank clerk,Mollie Truesdale (Jean Arthur), in the late 1930s, finds that her cherished dream of making a 17-day all-expenses-paid bus trip to the Pacific Coast and back, isn’t all she thought it would be…until she reaches Oregon and a bucking broncho tosses a rodeo performer on top of her and knocks her flat. Duke Hudkins (John Wayne), by way of apology, shows her the sights of Fairfield, Oregon, and she misses her bus, quarrels with the bewildered Duke, hitchhikes across a lot of desert…and a romance is born.Read More »

  • Norman Z. McLeod – Topper (1937)

    1931-1940ClassicsComedyNorman Z. McLeodScrewball ComedyUSA

    Quote:
    Thorne Smith is a name one hardly ever hears these days, and that’s a shame. In the 1920s and early ’30s, he was the popular author of a genre-defining series of novels in which mortal men broke out of their humdrum lives to embark on comic-erotic, supernaturally tinged adventures in the company of an exciting woman (or women). The most popular of these, Topper, was filmed in 1937, three years after Smith’s death. (Smith’s novel The Passionate Witch also became the basis for a classic film comedy, I Married a Witch (1942), and later the TV series Bewitched.)Read More »

  • George Cukor – Holiday [Criterion] (1938) (HD)

    USA1931-1940ComedyGeorge CukorRomanceScrewball Comedy

    Free-thinking Johnny Case finds himself betrothed to a millionaire’s daughter. When her family, with the exception of black-sheep Linda and drunken Ned, want Johnny to settle a career in finance, he rebels, wishing instead to spend the early years of his life on “holiday.” With the help of his friends Nick and Susan Potter, he makes up his mind as to which is the better course, and who he’d rather take the leap with.Read More »

  • Preston Sturges – Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

    1941-1950ComedyPreston SturgesRomanceScrewball ComedyUSA

    Quote:
    A brilliant black comedy by Preston Sturges, developed from a script he had written as early as 1932 and tried in vain to get Fox, Universal and Paramount intrested in producing. The script’s early provinence must be the reason that it’s the only one of his four post-Paramount pictures to feature dialogue comparable to (and sometimes surpassing) that found in the eight great comedies he wrote and directed in 1940–44, as well as numerous comedies that he had scripted in 1930s. The studios’ reluctance to make the film at that time is indicative of why it became a critical and a box office failure: the morbid subject matter, combined with the recent suicide of actress Carole Landis (who was suspected of having an affair with Rex Harrison, who plays the lead here), simply drove audiences away from it and for decades gave it a reputation of a film maudit.Read More »

  • Hal Roach – The Housekeeper’s Daughter (1939)

    1931-1940ComedyCrimeHal RoachScrewball ComedyUSA

    Synopsis
    A gangster’s moll runs home to mother, with reporters and amateur detectives hot on her tail. Cast: Joan Bennett, Adolphe Menjou, William Gargan, Victor Mature.Read More »

  • Gregory La Cava – Unfinished Business (1941)

    1941-1950ClassicsGregory La CavaRomanceScrewball ComedyUSA

    Synopsis
    In Unfinished Business, a light romantic comedy directed by Gregory La Cava, Irene Dunne plays a young woman worried she’s “going to seed” after spending her life in small-town Messina Ohio caring for her sister and father and having no love or adventure for herself. After her sister marries, she spontaneously takes the train ride to New York she’s always fantasized about to seek a career as a singer. On the train she meets a womanizer (Preston Foster) who sweeps her off her feet and leaves her flat at the station. She marries on the rebound (Robert Montgomery) but remains torn between two lovers — who happen to be brothers.Read More »

  • W.S. Van Dyke – Shadow of the Thin Man (1941)

    1941-1950ComedyMysteryScrewball ComedyUSAW.S. Van Dyke

    High society sleuths Nick and Nora Charles run into a variety of shady characters while investigating a race-track murder.Read More »

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