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Arts: The Technical Term is...Screwball Comedy
Independent, The (London), Apr 14, 2000 by Kevin Jackson
THIS IS one of the jewels of classic Hollywood: a phenomenon of the Thirties and early Forties, short-lived and never quite rivalled, crackling with Gatling-gun dialogue, sexual electricity, giddy action, florid eccentricity and startling moments of bleakness: think of Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby or Ball of Fire, Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve or The Palm Beach Story and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night.
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Hollywood has lost the knack and apparently the taste for such intricate delights, although Peter Bogdanovich made a very creditable stab at reviving screwball in What's Up, Doc? (1972), the Coen Brothers pastiched it in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), and some of its classic components - the stuffy, virginal hero, the forceful, anarchic or voraciously seductive heroine - appear in many other comedies, such as Carl Reiner's The Jerk (1978) written by and starring Steve Martin. It's worth noting that, in its heyday, the form tended to seep over into other genres: Hawks' The Big Sleep has a wonderful screwball scene in which Bacall and Bogart make a rapid-fire, prank phonecall to a police station. The Oxford English Dictionary notes "screwball" in print from 1938, a few years after the conventional starting-point, Hawks' Twentieth Century (1934). Once a mid- 19th century cricket and baseball slang term for a ball thrown with a reverse spin, it was later applied to any eccentric or maniac.
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