![]() ![]() The earliest screwball comedy was Lewis Milestone's The Front Page (1931) but it first gained prominence in 1934 with It Happened One Night, and, although many film scholars would agree that its classic period ended sometime in the early 1940s, elements of the genre have persisted, or have been paid homage to, in contemporary film. All these elements are generally delivered at break-neck speed. Screwball comedies combine the lunacy and ridiculousness of farce with the comic violence and hare-brained action of slapstick comedy, and the sophisticated and witty dialogue of the romantic comedy. The screwball comedy has proven to be one of the most popular and enduring film genres. It became widely used in 1936 to describe Carole Lombard's character in one of the best screwball comedies, My Man Godfrey. The word 'screwball' entered the language in the 1930s meaning 'insane' or eccentric. The pitch was 'invented' by Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants in the early 1900s, but it was not until around 1930 when another New York Giants player, Carl Hubbell, gave the pitch its name. It confuses the batter who doesn't know what to expect. In baseball, a screwball is an erratic pitch which is produced in a deliberate way by the pitcher, who throws the ball very fast, turning his wrist and letting the ball fly off his middle finger. However, after a twisting and turning plot, romantic love usually triumphs in the end. The zany but glamorous characters often have contradictory desires for individual identity and for union in a romance under the most unorthodox, insane or implausible circumstances (such as in Preston Sturges' classic screwball comedy and battle of the sexes The Lady Eve). The couple is often a well-to-do female interested in romance and a generally passive, emasculated, or weak male who resists romance, such as in Bringing Up Baby (1938), or a sexually-frustrated, humiliated male who is thwarted in romance, as in Howard Hawks' farce I Was a Male War Bride (1949). The films are usually set among wealthy people who can, despite the hardships of the Depression, afford to behave oddly. ![]() ![]() ![]() In screwball comedy, the romantic couple at the center of the story are eccentrics, often portrayed through slapstick. Some of the stars often present in screwball comedies included Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, William Powell, and Carole Lombard. They usually include visual gags (with some slapstick), wacky characters, identity reversals (or cross-dressing), a fast-paced improbable plot, and rapid-fire, wise-cracking dialogue and one-liners reflecting sexual tensions and conflicts in the blossoming of a relationship (or the patching up of a marriage) for an attractive couple with on-going, antagonistic differences (such as in The Awful Truth). "Its central romance was frequently instigated by an aggressive, even eccentric woman whose efforts to prod her more stodgy and conventional beau along the rocky road to the altar primed the comic mechanisms for a great deal of humor-byembarrassment." Improbable events, mistaken identities, and ominously misleading circumstantial evidence quickly compounded upon each other, albeit by seemingly logical progression, until a frantic conclusion in which even the impending marriage gives only faint promise of providing some whit of order as antidote to the previous narrative chaos. In general, they are light-hearted, frothy, often sophisticated, romantic stories, commonly focusing on a battle of the sexes in which both co-protagonists try to outwit or outmaneuver each other. Screwball comedies combine farce, slapstick, and the witty dialogue of more sophisticated films. The word screwball denotes lunacy, craziness, eccentricity, ridiculousness, and erratic behavior. Screwball comedy is more a style and attitude and historical happenstance than a genre - a distinctly American class of battle-of-the-sexes romantic farce. ![]()
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