Love and Laughter: A Cinematic Valentine's Day Bouquet - screwball and romantic film comedies

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 2000 by Wes Gehring

Whether screwball or romantic comedy, love invariably triumphs on the silver screen.

AS VALENTINE'S DAY approaches, it is time to take out your best clothes, make dinner reservations, and, oh yes, select a romantic comedy movie/video that will set the right mood for your special evening. This is a film genre which usually comes in two types--the screwball variety (with the accent on funny) and the traditional romantic comedy (with the accent on love).

The most obvious contrast between the two kinds addresses character behavior. The eccentric antics of the heroine, and the supporting players, are what give screwball comedy its name. For example, one has the zany conduct of Carole Lombard's socialite Irene Bullock in "My Man Godfrey" (1936), as well as the equally daffy behavior of the other Bullocks. When someone in the picture likens the family to mental asylum patients, Lombard's screen father (Eugene Pallette, with his famous bullfrog voice) observes, "All you need is an empty room and the right kind of people." ("Godfrey" was the first film to which period critics applied the term "screwball.")

Katharine Hepburn is even more of a madcap in the classic "Bringing Up Baby" (1938). Playing another screwball socialite (the genre catered to a Depression audience's desire for the escapism of watching the idle rich), Hepburn derailed every move of Cary Grant's absentminded professor. When the film was loosely remade as "What's Up, Doc?" (1972), it was Barbra Streisand's turn to work her bonkers behavior on Ryan O'Neal's professor (a profession such comedies always found a little silly).

Flash forward to the 1990s and Goldie Hawn's wacky huckster in "Housesitter" (1992) wins the cigar as the decade's most imaginative screwball. Her inspired pathological liar nearly drives Steve Martin's professorial architect to distraction, until he decides to join her quest for a sure grasp of confusion. More recently, Julia Roberts' title character in "Runaway Bride" (1999), which The New Yorker likened to Lombard, has this crazy habitual desertion reflex, whereby she leaves wannabe husbands at the altar. The title "Runaway Bride" also conjures up memories of the pioneering screwball comedy "It Happened One Night" (1934), in which Claudette Colbert's bride runs out on a large wedding. Moreover, the characters played by Colbert and Roberts both end up with newspaper reporters (Clark Gable and Richard Gere, respectively) they initially detested.

Screwball heroines are invariably complemented by nutty supporting players. The most interesting variety is the foreign eccentric, who often does not speak English. The classic take on this is writer/director Preston Sturges' creation of Toto (Sig Arno) for "The Palm Beach Story" (1942). Toto's country of origin is a screwball mystery, with miscommunication the order of the day. A more modern version is Richard Libertini's swami Prahka Lasa, who is in charge of transferring the soul of Edwina Cutwater (Lily Tomlin) into a new body in "All of Me" (1984).

This latter example brings one full circle back to the screwball heroine, whose spacey behavior sometimes makes the leading man equally nuts. Traditionally, this is a metaphorical "getting under his skin," but in "All of Me," Edwina is literally under there, and Steve Martin performs a tour de silly as her suddenly densely populated lawyer, Of course, this is merely a variation on the sexy comings and goings of screwball ghosts during the Hollywood studios' golden age (1929-46). The "Topper" series (starting in 1937) had the biggest cumulative effect; people tend to redefine eccentric when they see ghosts. My favorite "spirited" screwball film showcases Veronica Lake causing a comedy commotion as a born-again broom-rider in "I Married a Witch" (1942), which was the inspiration for the long-running television series "Bewitched" (1964-72).

In contrast, romantic comedy heroines are considerably less eccentric, whether it is Irene Dunne, the lady in the seminal "Love Affair" (1939), or the soon-to-be-married Meg Ryan in "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993). In fact, these heroines are often decidedly serious, such as Audrey Hepburn flirting with suicide at the start of "Sabrina" (1954). Other examples include Greta Garbo's "comrade" in "Ninotchka" (1939) and Margaret Sullavan's clerk in "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940), the latter loosely remade as "You've Got Mail" (1998). This is not to say they can't also be funny, such as Marsh Mason's dumped-on divorcee in "The Goodbye Girl" (1977) or Ryan's normally straight in "When Harry Met Sally (1989). Unlike the screwball heroine, though, they are never in danger of someone dropping a net over them.

With a romantic comedy heroine seldom in danger of jumping the tracks, her male counterpart tends to be more of a free spirit. Witness Charles Boyer's charming playboy painter in "Love Affair," wonderfully reprised by Cary Grant in the 1957 remake, "An Affair to Remember" (both directed by Leo McCarey). Melvyn Douglas' American playboy exudes the same allure in "Ninotchka," as he tries to melt Garbo's frosty Soviet commissar. When the two attempted to reverse the formula and make a screwball comedy with Garbo as the eccentric, the resulting film, "Two-Faced Woman" (1941), was a critical and commercial failure. (Nevertheless, what proved to be Garbo's last picture is better than its notoriety.) Just as Douglas played thaw master with Garbo in "Ninotchka," Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart applied the same romantic comedy heat to Katharine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), that decade's version of "The Taming of the Shrew."