Flourishing in the s and early 40s, screwball comedies were a breed of quick-talking romantic farces that fused silliness with sophistication in ways that still have the power to stupefy audiences. How can we keep up with dialogue that goes so fast?
Or with an urbane wit that takes no prisoners? Modern films by directors such as the Coens or David O. It needed a time and a place. The time was the Great Depression, when β as is so often stated β audiences were in need of escapism to glitzier worlds.
Circumstance, coincidence, fortune and misfortune show their successive cards with a logic, wit and lightness of touch rarely seen since the comedies of Shakespeare or Beaumarchais. Florida figures often, usually with gold-diggers in tow. And more than one classic screwball takes time out in Connecticut or Vermont.
It Happened One Night is not just the wellspring for s screwball but also an early prototype for the great American road movie. This film breathes some of the same lunatic air as certain biting satires that came out of France in the early s. Made at the height of the Depression, My Man Godfrey is an archetypal screwball vision of the nitwittery of the rich. A sable fur coat falling from a New York penthouse roof provides a magical open sesame to a world of wealth and privilege in Easy Living.
Dropping onto the shoulders of ordinary gal Mary Smith Jean Arthur , who is passing by on an open-topped bus, the garment leads first to her dismissal for what office clerk could afford a coat such as this?
