Screwball comedy

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Screwball comedy is a special subtype of Hollywood comedy film that peaked from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s. The English slang expression screwball describes a person with strange or bizarre habits. The term originally comes from baseball , where it describes a cut ball that is just as unpredictable.

Features of the screwball comedy

Screwball comedies often address the conflict between opposites such as education and uneducation, rich and poor, and above all men and women ( relationship comedy ), whereby these opposites are not balanced at the end of the film. Mostly the - largely - peaceful coexistence of opposites occurs. Ideally, they are characterized by a high degree of dialogue (with quickly spoken dialogues), fine and intelligent puns, a rapid pace and a cleverly constructed plot. The genre often borders on the farce and also takes on visual situation comedy borrowings from the silent film era. Mostly there are misunderstandings or secrets between the individual characters, which become more acute and widened in the course of the film, only to be resolved towards the end of the film.

The protagonists usually come from an urban, financially well-off milieu and therefore do not share the needs of their audience, which is often affected by the global economic crisis , although the global economic crisis is still often discussed in films such as It happened in one night or My man Godfrey . Many characters in screwball comedies stand out for their quirky, spirited, childlike, or eccentric behavior. Howard Hawks, for example, attributed the failure of his film Leopard Don't Kiss the fact that not a single normal character was featured in the entire film. Most of the - rich - characters in the genre are also characterized by a great deal of free time, you can hardly see them working. Often times, the wealthy characters receive a lesson in the course of the film that changes their character for the better. The often biting criticism of the rich and powerful corresponded to the wishes of the public, which was shaken by the economic crisis. But other areas of public life have also been criticized in screwball comedies, such as the sensational press in whose nothing is sacred or His Girl Friday .

A central theme was the battle of the sexes: at the beginning of the plot, the main character and the main character usually face each other as antagonists, and finally, after overcoming many obstacles, end up as a couple. Occasionally, couples find each other after long arguments, for example in The Night Before the Wedding or Mr. and Mrs. Smith . Men and women act at least equally, and often even the self-confident and intelligent female protagonist is superior to the man, for example in Breathless to Florida . This leads to frustration for the main male character. In this respect they are similar to the film noir with its femmes fatales , but in contrast to the film noir, screwball comedies always have a happy ending. Even in early films of the genre, sexual allusions between the main characters are often included. The restriction to allusions and ambiguous puns is due to the Hays Code , introduced in Hollywood in the early 1930s , a strict production code that banned the direct treatment of sensitive subjects such as adultery, prostitution and others and was mandatory from 1934.

History of the screwball comedy

The screwball comedy, for which puns were of great importance, began to emerge with the beginning of the sound film . Films like The Front Page (1931) and Trouble in Paradise (1932) already had screwball comedy characteristics without being included under that genre term. These can only be added in retrospect. Two films from 1934 set the style for the screwball comedy genre: Howard Hawks ' film adaptation of the Broadway hit Napoleon from Broadway ( Twentieth Century ) with John Barrymore and Carole Lombard and, above all, Frank Capra's classic It Happened in One Night (Engl. It Happened One Night ) with Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable . The screwball genre was highly successful with both critics and audiences over the next few years, but the classic screwball era was over by the mid-1940s at the latest. Many other genres of this time, such as the thin-man crime comedies or the dance films with Fred Astaire , are not exactly screwball comedies, but have borrowings from them.

Even more recent comedies that deviate from the common film clichés and come across as particularly intelligent and clever are sometimes also referred to as screwball comedies. Features of the genre were also often used in television series (e.g. In Love with a Witch , The Model and the Snoop or Sex and the City ).

Film examples

"Pre-Screwball Era"

Classic "screwball era"

Later examples / influences

Staff (selection)

Directors

Well-known directors of screwball comedy were:

actor

Leading actors regularly used in screwball comedies were:

There were also many supporting actors, often striking, who often played in screwball films.

literature

  • Karola Richter: Screwball comedies as a product of their time: "Don't make them sexual - make them crazy instead" . Diplomica , Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-8366-7453-9 ( Master's thesis Ruhr-Universität Bochum 1997, II, 77 pages, 27 cm).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ "Screwball Comedy" in the Film Lexicon
  2. ↑ "Screwball Comedy" in the Film Lexicon
  3. ↑ "Screwball Comedy" in the Film Lexicon
  4. ↑ Dancyger, Ken; Rush, Jeff Alternative Scriptwriting Focal Press. Pp. 85-85. ISBN 978-0-240-80849-9 , 2006. "The screwball comedy is funny film noir that has a happy ending ... The premise of the film is about the struggle in their relationship. During the course of the struggle, which is highly sexually charged, the maleness of the central character is challenged. The female is the dominant character in the relationship. This role reversion is central to the screwball comedy. "
  5. ↑ "Don't make it sexual - make it crazy instead" (quote from Ed Sikov ), on the website ( memento of the original from April 26, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. the author of this university thesis : Karola Richter @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.karola-richter.de