Screwballs of the silver screen: a treasured comedy genre turns 70: the 1934 releases of "It Happened One Night" and "Twentieth Century" launched Hollywood into an era of madcap zaniness that endures to this day

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2004 by Wes D. Gehring

SCREWBALL COMEDY turns 70 this year. While clown comedy has existed since the earliest days of cinema, the screwball variety arose during the Great Depression. One might liken it to an innovative brand of farce, where the old boy-meets-girl formula was turned on its ear, producing free-spirited heroines who gave as good as they got.

The pioneering screwball movies from 1934 were director Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" and Howard Hawks' "Twentieth Century." The former chronicles the comic misadventures of Claudette Colbert as a runaway heiress and Clark Gable as a wise-cracking reporter who battle themselves into an unexpected romance. "Twentieth Century" also is a picaresque picture, with a flamboyant Broadway producer (John Barrymore) attempting to convince a former protege/lover (Carole Lombard) to star in his next play as they cross America on the famous train Twentieth Century Limited.

These two movies, and screwball comedy in general, were predicated upon several developments then taking place in 1930s America. First, the genre was tied to a period of transition in American humor that had gained great momentum by 1934. The dominant comedy character type had been the capable crackerbarrel folk hero of Will Rogers; it now became an antihero best exemplified by The New Yorker writing of Robert Benchley and James Thurber, or by the film short subjects of Leo McCarey's Laurel and Hardy. Screwball comedy traded upon this antiheroic element, such as the ritualistic humiliation of the male, be it Gable's inability to make his hitchhiking techniques work, or the extremes to which Barrymore will go to raise money for a play. The screwball approach dressed up the surroundings and added beautiful people, but this was more a reflection of the need to mass market feature films than a substantive difference from Benchley and Thurber, or Laurel and Hardy. The zany outcome essentially was the same--an eccentrically comic battle of the sexes.

There is no easy explanation as to why the transition from capable to incompetent comic hero took place. Yet, if one were attempted, it probably would focus on an issue of socio-economics--the Depression. In a world that seemed more irrational by the day, the antihero suddenly was more relevant than the omniscient philosopher type.

A second period characteristic was the proclivity of screwball comedy to embrace the Depression-era fascination with the upper classes. Escapism by movie audiences hardly is limited to any one period. Yet, viewers of the 1930s were so taken with these opulent film backdrops that period Wall Street analysts labeled the movies of the day "Depression-proof." More to the point, plotlines often have couples coming from different social strata, such as in "It Happened One Night." In this picture, a blue-collar Gable comically teaches a spoiled-rich Colbert about the other side of the tracks, be it his donut dunking technique, or how best to live off the land. The beauty of their romance is that it becomes a metaphor, as suggested by historian Elizabeth Kendall, for "any kind of reconciliation--between the classes, the genders, the generations; between Depression anxiety and happy-go-lucky optimism." Thus, like much great art, this Capra movie reflects a given period, yet defines itself through universals that embrace many ages.

A third factor that impacted screwball comedy was Hollywood's implementation of a code of standards. The stone year these watershed works by Capra and Hawks debuted, the Motion Picture Production (or "Hayes") Code became fully enforced. This form of censorship was an outgrowth of public controversy over the era's violent gangster films and the sexual innuendo in the movies of Mac West and others, such as Jean Harlow and Norma Shearer. The industry's self-regulation, under heavy pressure from the Catholic Church's powerful Legion of Decency, would seem to have stimulated the development of screwball comedy.

American censorship always has been more concerned with sexuality than violence, however. It hardly seems a coincidence that screwball comedy--sometimes defined as "sex comedy without sex"--should blossom the same year the code appeared. Take, for instance, The "Walls of Jericho" scene from "It Happened One Night." The unmarried Gable and Colbert share a motel cabin, with their separate single beds divided by a blanket on a clothesline--the "Walls of Jericho." Leave it to Capra to use a biblical analogy to soften the sexuality factor. Moreover, when the "Walls" later tumble, the couple is safely married, and the viewer remains outside the cabin--to hear the sound of a my trumpet (a la the instrument used by the biblical Joshua to bring down the "Walls of Jericho").

A fourth component was the period popularity of such manic comedy teams as the Marx Brothers and Wheeler and Woolsey. A Defining trait of the zany couples was having them act more like broad comedians. They were sophisticates gone silly. A pioneering example of this sexy but clowning duo was the furious slapstick of Barrymore and Lombard---at times in their pajamas--in "Twentieth Century." Hawks later would describe this innovation as having the romantic leads "make damn tools of themselves." Critics in 1934 were not aware of the parallels between these screwball sophisticates and cinema's personality comedians. For instance, the Los Angeles Times review of "Twentieth Century" noted, "Hawks' direction is admirable, maintaining an element of surprise as it has not been maintained since The last Marx Brothers' nonsense." Gable and Colbert's best broad "comedy team" turn from "It Happened One Night" has them pretending to be a bickering man-led couple--in order to throw some detectives off their trail.