Themes
• Comic integration of outsiders (immigrants, other classes) and desire for assimilation.
• Exposing divisions in society through exaggeration but also working to heal those divisions.
• Theme of integration (or reintegration) into society of those who have become alienated.
Themes, continued
• Comic disruption of the forces of social order through chaos and disorder.
• Desire for upward mobility and cross-class relationships.
• Often ending with a marriage that signifies the formation of the new community out of the old.
Silent Era
• Charlie Chaplin: “Little Tramp” character at odds with machines, authority.
• Buster Keaton: deadpan features and inventive response to change.
• Harold Lloyd: the middle-class striver who never gives up; anxiety about fitting in.
Screwball Comedy
• Screwball comedy: eccentrically comic battle of the sexes, with the male generally losing.
• Hero of screwball comedy is an antihero forever frustrated by his attempts to create order.
• Thomas Sobchack and Vivian C. Sobchack: “the predatory female who stalks the protagonist” is a basic genre convention.
Screwball Comedy, continued• Goal: to free the man from
stuffy social conventions and allow the couple to learn the meaning of love and “natural” ways of behaving.
• Andrew Bergman: comedies bridged class differences but were essentially politically conservative because they sought to “patch up” differences rather than expose them.
• Carole Lombard and William Powell in My Man Godfrey, 1936
Screwball Comedy, Continued• Screwball comedy parodies the
traditional love story. The more eccentric partner, invariably the woman, usually manages a victory over the less assertive, easily frustrated man.
• Role reversal (aggressive woman, passive man) reflects anxieties about Depression-induced unemployment and instability of gender roles.
Conventions of Screwball Comedy
• Post-Production Code.• Screwball comedy had to find
substitutes for the frank sexuality of Pre-Code films.
• Slapstick violence • Witty dialogue.• Scenes with comic sexual tension or
predicaments (a couple trapped in a room or forced to pretend they are married, for example)
Settings
• Contemporary, often settings of wealth: ocean liners, country clubs, luxurious homes
• Often a movement from urban setting to the country (like Shakespeare’s “green world” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
• Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, The Lady Eve (1941)
Settings, Continued
• Often a movement from the world of one protagonist to the other, which causes a movement between classes as well.
• Settings sometimes incorporate the innocence of childhood: a playroom, a toy store, an attic with children’s toys.
Other Conventions
• Cross-dressing, disguises, or gender confusion; mistaken identity.
• Comic repetitions of scenes, phrases, and incidents, sometimes with elements reversed.
• Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, 1938.
Other Conventions, continued• Comic
misunderstandings, often over words; fast-paced, “hyperactive” dialogue.
• Screwball comedy places importance on the meanings of words, alerting audiences to double meanings.
• To signal this importance, characters are often writers or newspaper reporters.
• Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, 1934
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