1
The Screwball Comedy and Frank Capras It
Happened One Night

• Genre Definition and a Film Analysis

2
What is the screwball comedy?

• No general agreement among film historians on
  what constituted a screwball comedy or what films
  belong to the category.
• General agreement, however, is about the period
  in which the genre prospered - between 1934 and
  1938.

3
What is the screwball comedy?

• The genre began with Frank Capras It Happened
  One Night (1934) and ended with Howard Hawks
  Bringing Up Baby (1938)

4
What is the screwball comedy?

• One constant in this genre - the teaming up of a
  male star and a female star, who are entangled in
  love and the centre of comical spectacle.
• Some tendencies among film historians in
  understanding and identifying the genre,
  screwball comedy.
• Lewis Jacobs in his The Rise of the American Film
  (1939) - sociological discussion on the
  frustration and energy found screwball comedies.
  Jacobs ascribes it to the mood of the depression
  era.

5
What is the screwball comedy?

• Andrew Bergman in his Were in Money (1971) saw
  screwball comedies as a reactionary genre which
  was an attempt to clear up and purify rawer and
  more bawdry trends in comedy opened up by the
  Marx Brothers. Replaced humour.

6
What is the screwball comedy?

• Griffith and Mayer in their The Movies find in
  the genre a new image of courtship and marriage
  combined with slapstick or violent elements.
  This is attributed to the frustration felt during
  the economic crisis.
• While acknowledging the genre elements identified
  by film historians, Sarris denies their
  sociological connection to the social milieu of
  the period, the Depression era in the 1930s.

7
What is the screwball comedy?

• Andrew Sarris approach the genre not from the
  ideological but stylistic angle.
• The screwball comedy is the sex comedy without
  sex.
• Constants for screwball comedies
• Hardly no children and no babies. Comedies of
  courtship with propensities for quarrels and
  bickerings

8
Presence of talented comediennes with a variety
of trick voices, insinuating mannerisms, and
unearthly beauty. Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur,
Myrna Loy, and Barbara Stanwyck
9
What is the screwball comedy?

• The only actor indispensable to the genre - Cary
  Grant with shy, nervous detachment and clownish
  behaviour. He was often paired with Katharine
  Hepburn.

10
It Happened One Night

• Generally considered one of the greatest romantic
  comedies and the first screwball comedy. An
  escapist film about an unlikely pairing of a
  mismatched couple - a recently-fired newspaper
  man (Gable) and a wealthy heiress (Colbert) on a
  run.

11
It Happened One Night

• An unexpected box office hit and won five Academy
  Awards, unrivaled till One Flew over the Cuckoos
  Nest and then The Silence of the Lambs were
  awarded with five Oscars.

12
It Happened One Night

• Frustrated couple Gable and Colbert Frustration
  comes from the fact that sex is removed though it
  is a sex comedy.
• Debates on the arts of dunking, hitchhiking and
  riding piggyback.
• Romantic leads get laugh on their own.
• What other generic