Discovering Carole Lombard

During October 2008 Turner Classic Movies paid tribute to Carole Lombard as its Star of the Month, giving me the chance to learn more about this actress. One of the major stars of the early Hollywood studio period, Lombard is an actress who has a devoted following. There is even a film/fan site (Carol & Co.) that publishes almost daily articles about her. But before the TCM tribute I had seen her in only a couple of films, both of them well-known screwball comedies from the 1930s, one of my pet genres. Having now seen several more of her films from the late thirties and early forties (she died in a plane crash in 1942 at the age of 33), I can understand why she has inspired such devotion among her fans. She will not supplant my absolute personal favorites of the early studio era—Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, and Irene Dunne—but she will now be one of my also-greats, joining the likes of Barbara Stanwyck, Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, Greta Garbo, and Margaret Sullavan—not bad company to be in.

Carole Lombard appeared in her first movie in 1921 at the age of thirteen. She had appeared in around 60 films before she got the lead in the movie that made her a star: Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century (1934). This was the year screwball comedy was born in Hollywood with It Happened One Night, setting off a craze for the genre that lasted nearly ten years. (According to the website notstarring.com, Lombard turned down the lead in It Happened One Night.) Twentieth Century was the other notable example of screwball comedy from that year and exhibits the take on the genre that Hawks would continue with his masterpieces Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940). It's all there in Hawks's very first attempt at the new genre—the frenetic pacing, rapid-fire dialogue, contrived but hilarious situations, put-upon supporting characters, and egotistical lead characters.

Twentieth Century was just about the last remaining classic screwball comedy I had never seen, and what a treat it was to see it at last. The movie has now joined my list of the top examples of the genre. John Barrymore, lampooning his own image, stars as Oscar Jaffe, a flamboyant, manipulative, often hysterical Broadway director given to melodramatic pronouncements like "The iron door slams!" and "Anathema! Child of Satan!" at moments of heightened emotionalism. Lombard plays his new discovery, a shopgirl named Mildred Plotka whom Jaffe wants to rename Lily Garland and transform into a star. Only Jaffe has any faith in the newcomer's ability, and at this point the screenplay requires that Lombard be weepy, immature, and so insecure that she is ready to give up the idea of acting and return to the sales counter. But with patience, encouragement, and gentle cajoling, Jaffe does succeed into molding her into a star.

Three years later Lily is the most esteemed actress on the New York stage, and Jaffe, like a true Svengali, is now romantically involved with her. But he has become so possessive, controlling, and jealous that Lily can no longer stand him. Now Lombard must play her character in a completely different mode—successful, confident, mature, independent, and rebellious. She walks out on Jaffe ("That's not love," she says of their relationship. "It's sheer tyranny. I'm no Trilby.") and heads for Hollywood.

The plot now shifts ahead even further. Lily is a hugely successful movie star, and Oscar is close to financial ruin, not having had one successful production since Lily left him. By chance he finds himself on the same train as Lily, the Twentieth Century Limited, traveling from Chicago to New York. Convinced that his career will be saved if he can just get her to star in his next production, he determines to get her to agree to do so before the train reaches its destination. The dirty tricks campaign he embarks on (not dissimilar to Cary Grant's efforts to stop his ex-wife from remarrying in His Girl Friday) and the complications that follow occupy the bulk of the movie.

The rub, though, is that Lily, having achieved Hollywood stardom, has become as much of a temperamental egomaniac as her former mentor, and Lombard is now required to portray Lily as a swollen-headed, self-centered shrew. Reportedly, Lombard was so intimidated by working with Barrymore, who at the time was still at the height of his profession, that Hawks had to take her aside and threaten to replace her if she didn't loosen up and stop holding back in her scenes with him. Whatever Hawks did, it must have worked, for Lombard easily holds her own with Barrymore for the rest of the movie and gives as good as she gets. It was no surprise that Barrymore was up to the demands of his role. The surprise is how well Lombard, pretty much untried in this type of exaggerated, broad comedy, does with her role, which unlike Barrymore's requires her to act convincingly in three different modes—first insecure, then independent, and finally insufferable.

If Twentieth Century clearly showed how good Lombard was at broad comedy, it only hinted at her remarkable range as an actress. It took a whole series of movies to do this. In My Man Godfrey (1936), another classic screwball comedy, Lombard plays Irene Bullock, one of those proverbial madcap heiresses. But her performance is much less theatrical than in Twentieth Century, and her sweet-natured, guileless naiveté is utterly charming. Her speech is fast and breathless, rather like Katharine Hepburn's in Bringing Up Baby. Like Hepburn in that movie, Lombard's character is impulsive and mercurial, and she shows the same child-like resolve to get her man. This performance earned Lombard her only Oscar nomination.

The next year Lombard made another classic screwball comedy, Nothing Sacred. She plays Hazel Flagg, a young woman who has been mistakenly diagnosed with radium poisoning and is turned into an overnight media celebrity by a cynical reporter played by Fredric March. This is a movie loved by many, but—prepare yourselves for sacrilege—it is one that I have never totally warmed to, even after repeated viewings. For some reason the movie just doesn't click for me the way my favorite screwball comedies do. Despite mixed feelings about the film, I still find the lead performances outstanding, particularly Lombard's, in which she shows a flair for unpretentious physical comedy that pokes fun at her glamor and her astounding beauty. Many consider this her signature performance, and for anyone interested in her career it is essential viewing.

Lombard's work in two lesser-known movies is further evidence of her versatility. In 1935 she made a little comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen called Hands Across the Table, in which she plays a manicurist in a swanky New York hotel whose one goal is to marry a rich man. She sets her sights on rich paraplegic Ralph Bellamy but finds herself falling in love with Fred MacMurray, whom she believes to be penniless. (Of course, he isn't.) It sounds like a classic screwball comedy situation, but the movie lacks the antic quality typical of the genre. Lombard comes across as quite level-headed and practical and maybe just a bit disappointed with life. In the end she chooses MacMurray not just because of love, but also because she is simply too nice to exploit Bellamy in such a mercenary way. Lombard creates a quietly touching and intelligent character who is quite distinct from her boisterous Lily in Twentieth Century, her energetic Hazel in Nothing Sacred, or her whimsical Irene in My Man Godfrey.

Lombard turns in another impressive performance that showcases her ability to integrate the light with the serious in In Name Only (1939). In this film she plays a widow and mother who rents a house for the summer from Cary Grant. Grant is unhappily married to Kay Francis, who he has discovered married him solely for his money. Grant and Lombard are immediately attracted to one another and quickly fall in love. The problem is Grant's possessive wife, who refuses to give him a divorce. The movie is a showcase for the range of both Lombard and Grant, who seem to have tremendous chemistry. They are allowed to behave at times in a relaxed, loving, and light-hearted manner with each other—the considerable charm of both actors at full throttle—and at other times in a serious and troubled manner when various obstacles, including the machinations of Grant's duplicitous wife, keep them apart. The plot is pure soap, but both Lombard and Grant rise above the familiar plot to create characterizations that are completely winning. If there were ever any doubts about Lombard's ability to handle serious roles, her performance in In Name Only surely put them to rest.

In two of her last movies Lombard returned to the comedy genre she was so associated with. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941) is a screwball-type comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his only effort at a purely comic picture. The movie, while enjoyable, lacks both Hitchcock's distinctive touches and the sparkle typical of the genre. Lombard is the best thing in the movie, and the presence of her by-now distinctive personality is alone sufficient reason to watch it.

The most remarkable thing about the movie is how closely Lombard conforms to Hitchcock's idealized image of blonde beauty as personified by his other leading women like Madeleine Carroll, Grace Kelly, and Eva Marie Saint. Lombard was a very beautiful woman, but she never looked lovelier than in this picture. She is photographed by the great Harry Stradling in ways that deliberately emphasize her stunning facial beauty. Time and again, as she was photographed in close-up, with her full lips, prominent cheekbones, and straight, rather long nose, I was reminded of Greta Garbo. Like Garbo, Lombard's face seems mask-like, sculpturesque, and ethereal—an archetypal image of timeless female beauty. Garbo's favorite cinematographer, William Daniels, once remarked that Garbo "had no bad angles." The same could be said of Carole Lombard in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and to adore that exquisite face is reason enough to see this movie.

Carole Lombard's last picture, To Be or Not to Be (1942), improbably manages to combine topical anti-Nazism with pointed comedy. Released the year after her death, it was directed by Ernst Lubitsch. In Lombard's entire screen career, she was probably never paired with a director whose light comedic touch was so attuned to her own comedic skills, and in this film she gives what to me is her most enchanting performance. As the beautiful leading lady of a Polish theater troupe that finds itself engaged in a battle of wits with Nazis to help the Polish Resistance and to effect its own escape to Britain, she is married to its egotistical leading man, played by Jack Benny.

Lombard's restrained performance forms quite a contrast to Benny's intentionally hammy one; she is at times required almost to play the "straight man" to her costar. Benny's outrageous antics propel the complicated ruse the troupe concocts to dupe the Nazis, while the beautiful Lombard handles the romantic distractions involved in the ruse. She never falters in the face of Benny's purposeful overacting but delivers an understated portrait of a woman who possesses great shrewdness, poise, and dignity beneath her glamorous exterior. The Lubitsch touch and the Lombard touch turn out to be a perfect match, and the film stands as an appropriate valedictory tribute to her beauty, grace, charm, and ability to seamlessly blend seriousness with humor.

By all accounts the real Carole Lombard was an unpretentious, generous, lively person with an outsized sense of humor. In one way or another those qualities all come through in her movie characters. Add to those qualities her great acting talent and her gorgeous looks, and you have a working definition of what is referred to as Star Quality.

Bringing Up Baby: The Funniest Screwball Comedy

Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and Howard Hawks. A dog, a leopard, and a dinosaur bone. Charlie Ruggles, May Robson, and Barry Fitzgerald. Some of the most hilarious visual and verbal comedy ever put on film. These are the main ingredients of the funniest example of screwball comedy ever made: Bringing Up Baby (1938).

I've written previously of the classic elements of screwball comedy ("An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy"), and Bringing Up Baby fulfills the definition of the genre in every respect. Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a paleontologist engaged to be married the next day to his assistant Alice Swallow, an unromantic, bossy, and humorless woman ("I see our marriage purely as a dedication to your work," she tells him at the beginning of the movie). David himself is only slightly less rigid and conventional than his fiancée. He is a dedicated careerist who seems less excited by the prospect of his imminent marriage than by the news that the last missing bone of the brontosaurus skeleton he is erecting has been discovered and will arrive shortly.

But first he must meet and play golf with the lawyer who represents a potential benefactor, Elizabeth Random (May Robson), a rich woman who is considering donating one million dollars to David's museum. It is at the golf course that he has his first unfortunate encounter with a scatter-brained and impetuous heiress named Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a character for whom the term "madcap" might have been invented. She appropriates his golf ball and his car and wrecks both the car and, at least temporarily, David's chances of getting the donation. Unknown to David, Susan happens to be the niece of Mrs. Random, so it is inevitable that their paths will cross again . . . and again . . . and again. In fact, once he meets her a second time that evening in a night club, where he has gone (carrying with him the box containing his precious dinosaur bone) to meet the lawyer and try to salvage his chances for the donation, he is trapped with her in a hellish and hilarious relationship that lasts for the rest of the movie, a relationship that involves him not only with Susan but with her aunt, her fox terrier George, a pet leopard named Baby, and other assorted eccentric characters including a tipsy gardener (Barry Fitzgerald), a befuddled big-game hunter (Charles Ruggles), a self-important psychiatrist, and an officious small-town sheriff.

In truth, this impromptu relationship is the result of Susan's almost instant decision that she is in love with David and that to get him she will do anything to prevent him from making it to his wedding the next day. (I said she was impetuous, didn't I?) As in many screwball comedies of the 1930's and early 1940's, the man is the reluctant object of romantic desire, and the woman is the single-minded pursuer. In Bringing Up Baby it is inarguable that Susan's determination to snare David is the initial force that sets in motion the machinery of the plot. And the plot of Bringing Up Baby is indeed a complex and finely tuned machine that, once started, hurtles forward at breakneck speed and propels the viewer to everything else that happens in the movie.

What I refer to as everything else is so complicated that it is impossible to summarize briefly. As in the best silent comedies, from a prime situation—here the random encounter at the golf course—the narrative builds in a headlong, unpredictable, and intricate way that defies synopsis or even concise description. Just when you think the inventory of comic conventions has been exhausted, that every conceivable comic complication has been laid on, Hawks piles on yet another one. The film is virtually an encyclopedia of movie comedy. It contains everything: pratfalls—on a slippery Martini olive, into poison ivy, down a hillside, into a river, even from the scaffolding of David's brontosaurus skeleton—verbal miscommunication and talking at cross-purposes, mistaken identity, impersonation, comic deception, even a doppelganger in the form of a second (but feral) leopard. Everything in the movie becomes fodder for comedy: clothing, automobiles, golf, gangsters, circuses, academia, psychiatry, law enforcement. Nothing is too serious or too sacred to be spared Hawks's acerbic, limitlessly inventive imagination. The pace is relentless, leaving the viewer not only breathless but overcome with laughter.

Bringing Up Baby is quite simply the funniest movie I have ever seen. The long sequences in which David and Susan follow George the dog, trying to find where he buried that crucial dinosaur bone he has stolen, and in which David and Susan try to capture the escaped leopard using a croquet mallet and a fish-landing net are deliriously funny. And when virtually the entire cast, including the leopard, converges on the local jail and Susan pretends to be the hard-boiled leader of a gang of bank robbers, the movie has so far departed from any semblance of reality, logic, and normal human behavior that it seems to inhabit a universe of its own, not unlike one of the more outlandish Marx Brothers movies or plays of Oscar Wilde: silliness so sublime that it is elevated to art.

You might think that with all these mad plot complications, and with all this hilarious physical and verbal comedy going on, the characters would take a back seat. Yet that is not the case, for the characters of Susan and David as impersonated by Hepburn and Grant are the glue that holds the movie together. They are the force that moves the film from the clever mechanics of comedy to the humanity of an evolving romantic relationship.

In a recent blog ("The Definitive Screwball Comedy") I described how the main characters in another screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, a married couple who separate and then reconcile at the last moment, were ideally suited to each other all along and that their notions of incompatibility are nonsense. In Bringing Up Baby the situation could hardly be more different. In this movie Susan and David are complete opposites and truly seem to be wholly unsuited to each other. Yet it is precisely their opposite temperaments that, paradoxically, make them the ideal match. Susan, like her pet leopard, is untamed, unpredictable, and predatory. (Her pursuit of David might today be referred to as "stalking.") Compared to Susan, David, like his dinosaur, is ossified, without flesh and blood, and lacking animation. She is emotional; he is rational. She is all impulse; he is all control. To put it in Freudian terms, if she is ruled by her id, then he is ruled by his superego. Separately, each is an incomplete personality. Each needs the other to supply the missing parts of his or her temperament, for only together will each become a complete and balanced personality. To accomplish this, Susan has to gain self-control and gravity, and David must learn to loosen his self-control and let himself go.

This is exactly what happens at the end of Bringing Up Baby. Susan applies herself to seriously looking for the missing bone and when she finds it a few days later contritely delivers it to David at the museum. The now subdued Susan tells him that her aunt gave her the million dollars and that she in turn has decided to donate it to the museum herself. And when she apologizes for her behavior, David, who earlier had told her, "Our relationship has been a series of misadventures from beginning to end," finally thaws. "I just discovered that was the best day I had in my whole life," he confesses. "I never had a better time." When the dinosaur skeleton collapses in the last scene and David lifts Susan to the now isolated platform overlooking a pile of dinosaur bones and embraces her, it is more than just another hilarious sight gag. It is the visual evidence that Susan has finally succeeded in her pursuit of David and has now conquered the last remaining rival for his affection—his obsessive devotion to his work.

Regular readers of this blog may well be wondering why, having already named The Awful Truth as the definitive screwball comedy, I am writing about Bringing Up Baby as though that title belonged to it. The truth is that each of these movies is, in its own way, a definitive version of the screwball comedy. But the two films are so different that any consideration of the two movies together results in the proverbial Apples and Oranges situation: yes, they are both fruit, but they are otherwise so unalike that any attempt at comparison would seem impossibly problematic .

One comparison that is possible, though, is that of methods. The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby represent opposite approaches to the same end—the classic screwball comedy dilemma of showing how two people who believe they are unsuited to each other discover that this is not the case at all. The Awful Truth exhibits all the Apollonian virtues. It is controlled, balanced, ordered, and temperate. In contrast Bringing Up Baby exhibits all the characteristics of the Dionysian sensibility. It is spontaneous, chaotic, and anarchic, intoxicated with the passion and excess of its own exuberant absurdism. Each is a perfect exemplar of its chosen approach. The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby—for me these are the twin stars around which the galaxy of screwball comedy orbits.

Apples or oranges? I'll have one of each, please.

The Awful Truth: The Definitive Screwball Comedy

A few weeks ago I wrote about the classic American screwball comedy ("An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy"). In that post I described the typical dilemma of the genre: a character must choose between two possible romantic interests who represent on the one hand safety and conformity and on the other hand risk and idiosyncrasy. In 1937, only three years after the original screwball comedy, It Happened One Night, was released, a movie came along that for me represents the apogee of the genre, The Awful Truth, starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne and directed by Leo McCarey.

At the beginning of the movie the two main characters, Jerry (Cary Grant) and Lucy (Irene Dunne), the type of urban sophisticates who routinely populated the screwball comedies of the 1930's, are already married. Jerry, just returned from a trip to Florida, finds that in his absence Lucy has been enjoying herself with their friends and immediately notices that she seems to be receiving a great deal of attention—and returning it—from a suave Continental bachelor who has "gigolo" written all over him. His jealousy aroused, Jerry refuses to believe Lucy's protests that that her actions have been entirely innocuous. As the squabble between the two escalates, Lucy, dismayed and frustrated with her husband's lack of trust in her, files for divorce and the two separate.

In typical screwball fashion, each soon becomes attached to someone else. Lucy becomes engaged to a new neighbor, a rich oilman (and mother-dominated hick) from Oklahoma. This character, played by Ralph Bellamy, is in every way the opposite of Jerry—slow-witted, unsophisticated, and unimaginative. Jerry is at first desperate to win Lucy back before the divorce decree becomes final and does everything he can think of to sabotage her engagement, including becoming attached to an embarrassingly tawdry nightclub performer named Dixie Belle Lee in an effort to make Lucy jealous. When all his efforts fail, he gives up and becomes engaged to a dull and conventional heiress. It is just at this point that Lucy finally realizes that she still loves Jerry and that her oilman is all wrong for her. She breaks off her engagement and lays plans to get Jerry back. Her scheme succeeds with hilarious results and the two are reunited just before their divorce decree becomes final.

What makes The Awful Truth the definitive screwball comedy is not just its archetypal plot, which the brief synopsis above hardly does justice to. What really makes it special is its perfect confluence of star power, inspired direction, and tremendously entertaining situations. It is in this movie that the Cary Grant persona as moviegoers came to experience it over the next three decades emerged fully formed. Cary Grant had been working in movies for five years before making The Awful Truth, which was his thirtieth film credit. Yet seeing him in movies like Sylvia Scarlett (1936) or the two Mae West classics She Done Him Wrong or I'm No Angel (both 1933), one might find it hard to believe that this is the same actor. In The Awful Truth he is relaxed, urbane, slyly witty, subtly funny, slightly disreputable, everything that one associates with the screen personality "Cary Grant." The screen persona of the comic Cary Grant was born in this movie and continued with little alteration until he retired in the mid-1960's.

Like Grant, Irene Dunne was an experienced movie performer when she made The Awful Truth, but unlike Grant she was already a major star and two-time Academy Award nominee. She had appeared in just about every kind of Hollywood movie, from Westerns to musicals and especially ultrasentimental tearjerkers. She had a lovely soprano singing voice and an affinity for the songs of Jerome Kern, playing Magnolia in the 1936 version of Show Boat. Yet she had her first major comedy role, in Theodora Goes Wild, just the year before. In The Awful Truth she shows a real affinity for both sophisticated and physical comedy, and it's hard to imagine an actress who would have been so perfect as Lucy. At key moments she gives what I think of as the Irene Dunne reaction, a slightly vacant expression of wry surprise and disbelief that in its way is as distinctive as Grant's familiar recoiling, wide-eyed double-take. Her ability to balance, and sometimes to project simultaneously, conflicting emotions made her one of the most versatile and talented actresses of the studio era. Her seriousness in this movie is tempered with lightheartedness, and her whimsicality with restraint. Like Grant, her frustration is comic, and her comic behavior is a response to emotional turmoil. The interaction of these two actors makes it clear to the viewer that the characters they play are ideally suited to each other and that their notions of incompatibility are complete nonsense.

Those familiar with the later work of director Leo McCarey, swamped in heavy-handed sentimentality and a curiously outdated sensibility, might find it difficult to believe that he was responsible for The Awful Truth. In fact, McCarey had previously worked with many notable Hollywood comics, including Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Mae West, and Harold Lloyd. He was responsible for two of the funniest movies ever made, the Marx Brothers' zany Duck Soup (1933) and the delightful Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). The Awful Truth is masterfully directed, with a sure command of controlled comic invention and a light touch throughout. It is packed with clever sight gags and moments of restrained physical comedy that stop just short of farce. And as in the best movie comedies, these humorous bits always seem to grow from the plot and never to be arbitrarily imposed on it. For The Awful Truth McCarey won an Oscar as Best Director, an award that was well deserved.

Three sequences in the movie are especially memorable. Early on, Jerry and Lucy go to court to see who will get custody of their dog, Mr. Smith, played by the same fox terrier that played Asta in the Thin Man series. The judge decides that he will let the dog make the choice, and both Jerry and Lucy begin frantically calling him to come to them. But Lucy has a trick up her sleeve (or in this case up the muff she has carried into court): Mr. Smith's new toy, a ball shaped like a bulldog's head, which, without letting either Jerry or the judge see, she uses to get the dog to run to her. Mr. Smith is really Jerry's dog, so why is she so determined to get custody of him? Is she just being competitive, or is she unconsciously seeking a way to keep Jerry connected to her (he is awarded visiting rights)? Either way it's a very funny sequence, directed and performed with precision timing.

Later in the movie, Lucy hits upon a clever ruse to break up Jerry's engagement. She turns up at the swanky party Jerry's snobbish fiancée and future in-laws are giving on the very night that the divorce decree is to become final. Pretending to be Jerry's fictitious sister, Lola, she appears as a garishly dressed, bubble-headed lush, a professional singer clearly based on Dixie Belle. She pretends to get drunk and insists on performing the tasteless and risqué musical number she saw Dixie Belle do in the nightclub, correctly predicting that the humiliated Jerry will rush her out of the party and drive her home. To see the refined Lucy as performed by the refined Dunne cut loose like this, a departure into controlled slapstick so out of character for Lucy, is the high point of the movie. And to know that Lucy's gauche behavior is all a pretense just makes the whole episode all the more funny.

But Lucy's plot is not yet over. She contrives to have Jerry drive her to her aunt's country cabin instead of to her own apartment and further contrives for the car to break down so that they will be forced to spend their last night together as husband and wife in the remote cabin. What ensues is another bout of hilariously restrained slapstick that involves adjoining bedrooms, a connecting door that refuses to stay shut, and a mechanical clock with male and female figures (actually Grant and Dunne in Alpine costumes on a huge mock-up of the clock) emerging from and returning to separate doors as the clock ticks away to midnight, when the divorce decree becomes final.

Will Jerry give in to temptation and sleep in Lucy's room, which will invalidate the divorce decree? Will she let him? Of course, but not until they have negotiated a truce. The suspicion and jealousy that wrecked their relationship will be banished; their renewed marriage will be based on the principle of mutual trust. Theirs will be a modern marriage in the style of Nick and Nora Charles, one of partnership combined with independence. Just as the mechanical clock strikes midnight the two figures emerge from their separate compartments, but this time they both return to hers, an ingenious sight gag concocted by McCarey not only to skirt Production Code issues but to indicate visually the reconciliation of Jerry and Lucy.

His Girl Friday: A Distinctively Bitter Screwball Comedy

"[Howard] Hawks has stamped his distinctively bitter view of life on adventure, gangster and private-eye melodramas, Westerns, musicals, and screwball comedies."

— Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

After watching Howard Hawks's classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday (1940) with a friend recently, I asked him what he thought of it. He admitted that it was a very funny movie but then confessed that in the end he didn't really like it very much. When I asked him why not, he replied, "Because there weren't any nice people in it." His comment made me realize that the cynical view of human nature pervading Hawks's movies, even his comedies, is something I have come to take for granted. Even in a Hawks comedy it no longer strikes me as incongruous because it is what I expect of any Hawks film.

In His Girl Friday, based on the play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, Cary Grant plays Walter Johnson, the editor of a New York newspaper. Rosalind Russell plays Hildy Johnson, his ex-wife and star reporter. The play was filmed once before by Lewis Milestone in 1931 under its original title, with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien playing Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson, and has since been remade several times and in many other guises. Hawks's major innovation was to update the source material to the then-fashionable screwball genre by making Hildy a female character and also Walter's ex-wife.

In the very first scene Hildy walks briskly through the crowded, bustling city room and into Walter's office to announce not only her resignation from the newspaper but her engagement to Bruce Baldwin (Ralph Bellamy), a strait-laced insurance agent from Albany. In typical Hawks fashion, this walk to Walter's office—with its swift pace, lengthy tracking shots as the camera follows Hildy's progress through the city room, abundant visual detail, and non-stop banter between Hildy and the other reporters—sets the tone for the whole movie. The entire sequence is one of continuous movement and sarcastic, rapid-fire dialogue.

As soon as Hildy announces her intention to resign and remarry, Walter immediately begins a campaign to thwart her in both of these intentions. His strategy is to convince her through flattery and chicanery that she is the only person who can possibly cover the story of convicted murderer Earl Williams, scheduled to be executed the next morning unless a last-minute reprieve from the governor comes through. What follows is in many ways an archetypal screwball comedy. Baldwin is a likeable but vapid dunce, and Hildy is clearly making a mistake in her plans to leave behind the excitement of her career and unstable life with Walter for the comfortable, unchallenging boredom of a conventional marriage, "with a house and children," to Baldwin. What really distinguishes His Girl Friday from other screwball comedies of the time, though, is precisely what disturbed my friend about the movie: the cynicism in which Hawks steeps the characters and their behavior.

Hawks's bitter view of humanity—his deep conviction that all human action is essentially motivated by self-interest—is projected onto nearly every character in His Girl Friday. In no character is this more apparent than in Cary Grant's Walter Johnson. His dirty tricks campaign to sabotage Hildy's engagement is relentless. So single-minded is he in pursuing his goal that his actions are wholly unrestrained by what would normally be considered human feeling.

The hapless Bruce Baldwin is the repeated victim of Walter's machinations. Walter intentionally humiliates Baldwin the first time he meets him by marching up to an elderly and unattractive man and pretending to mistake him for Baldwin. The mild-mannered Baldwin meekly sits in the background, unable to get a word in edgewise because of Walter's non-stop effusion in introducing himself to the man he has pretended to mistake for Hildy's fiancé. When Hildy, who seems not at all surprised by Walter's self-centered sense of humor, arrives and sorts out the situation, Walter responds with mock apology, and the credulous Baldwin innocently assumes there has been a true case of mistaken identity, never for a moment suspecting Walter's manipulative ruse. Walter continues to torment Baldwin at every turn (even causing him unjustly to land in jail), and Baldwin continues to believe that the string of merciless humiliations is unintentional. That Hawks manages to obscure the innate unkindness of Walter's repeated victimization of Baldwin by making it seem very, very funny is a testament to Hawks's skill at wresting humor from the most unpromising premise—that even cruelty can be played for laughs.

Even the initially sympathetic Hildy eventually shows her true nature when, as Walter intended, she is hooked by the irresistible lure of the story she has committed herself to write. (She has agreed to do this for purely mercenary reasons, to earn $5,000 so that she and Baldwin can buy a house and not be forced to live with his mother.) She is simply too thoroughly a professional reporter to overcome her natural instinct to pursue to the end, and if necessary embellish, a potential story. In the press room at the prison, she easily holds her own with the other reporters—all male, all aggressively pursuing the same story. But it is when she is finally allowed to conduct an interview with the condemned killer that Hawks fully reveals his cynic's conception of her exploitative personality.

The condemned killer, like Bruce Baldwin another soft-spoken naïf, has no clear conception of why he actually shot his victim; the murder seems to have been more the result of an accident than an intentional act. Yet Hildy, in her "interview" with the laconic killer, cleverly manages to create a story where there is none. This she does by putting words in the befuddled and suggestible man's mouth until she has created a scenario that not only appears to explain his actions but also in large measure exculpates him by making him seem to have been temporarily insane at the time.

The minor characters in the movie also get their share of Hawks's bile. The reporters in the press room are portrayed as vultures. They are, after all, essentially participating in an all-night death watch with the remote possibility that a last-minute reprieve from the governor will arrive before Williams hangs. Either way, they will get their story, and that is all these ultra-competitive scoundrels care about. When Williams's lady friend of one night, another pathetic and lonely individual, arrives and then dramatically throws herself from the window, the reporters all race to the window and stare into the courtyard below, waiting for the ambulance to arrive. "She's dead," one calmly says. "No she ain't. She's movin'," another impassively adds. Then they all race back to the telephones to call in the story.

But Hawks reserves his most vitriolic judgments for the elected officials in the movie, the sheriff and the city mayor, two characters of such unredeemed ambition, greed, and corruption that they make the politicians, lawyers, and bankers in the typical Frank Capra movie seem almost innocuous in comparison. When a messenger from the governor does indeed arrive with a reprieve, the mayor, desperately needing to be perceived as a law-and-order crime fighter before facing an election the next week, bribes the messenger and persuades him to take the retrieve back and pretend he arrived too late to prevent the hanging. The sheriff, his crony, abets him in this scheme.

In the end, after many more complications, Williams is saved from execution and declared to have been temporarily insane at the time of the shooting, and the corrupt sheriff and mayor are exposed. Baldwin returns to Albany without Hildy, and Hildy returns to both Walter and the newspaper. Despite, and in some measure because of, the fallibility of human nature, order has been restored and justice has prevailed—at least for a little while, for in Hawks's world human nature may be constant, but everything else is in perpetual motion.

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Trivia notes: It is widely known that although Cary Grant, who had worked with Hawks before, was cast early as Walter Johnson, virtually every major comic actress in Hollywood turned down the role of Hildy (including, according to notstarring.com, Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, and Ginger Rogers) before the part was offered to Rosalind Russell. I have also read that after viewing the first dailies, Hawks and his stars all realized that something wasn't working. At a loss to identify what was wrong, Hawks suggested that the actors speed up the dialogue, firing it off at about half again the speed they had been using. After seeing the results, all agreed that the problem was fixed.

An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy

In the late 1930's and early 1940's, comedy in American movies was dominated by what came to be called screwball comedy. In Britain, the genre was known as crazy comedy, which British writer Leslie Halliwell defines as "seemingly adult people behaving in what society at the time thought was a completely irresponsible way" (Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion). My own conception of American screwball comedy is more specific than this.

For me screwball comedy has a classic trajectory. A character is forced to choose between two opposing alternatives. On the one hand is safety, conformity, and predictability; on the other is risk, idiosyncrasy, and unpredictability. Most often this choice is presented in romantic terms: a man or woman must choose between two possible love interests, each of whom represents one of these alternative ways of seeing the world and behaving. Typically, the main character initially chooses the safer, more conventional alternative. The movie, then, details how this person comes to change his or her mind and instead opts for the more adventurous alternative. This is invariably the resolution of the conflict, for Americans prize individuality (on the notional level at any rate) above all other character traits.

This basic situation is in truth not all that innovative. It is essentially an Americanized updating of the classic romantic dilemma created by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice, whose heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, must choose between the sanctimonious, asexual Mr. Collins and the rich, handsome, and intelligent Mr. Darcy. What transforms this traditional romantic dilemma into screwball comedy is the addition of the element of conformity versus nonconformity to the choices confronting the main character.

The first American screwball comedy is generally, and I believe rightly, considered to be Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934). So completely did this new kind of movie captivate audiences and the industry that the movie received all four major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Actress, and Director), the first time this had ever happened and an accomplishment not to be repeated for more than forty years, by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). In Capra's movie, heiress Claudette Colbert runs away from her overprotective father to marry a fortune-hunter she has become infatuated with. Pursued by the kind of fast-talking, get-the-story-at-any-cost newspaper reporter (Clark Gable) who populated city rooms in the movies of the 1930's, the initially hostile Colbert is finally and reluctantly won over by Gable's working-class, no-nonsense, down-to-earth masculinity and bravado. He, in turn, comes to see her as more than just a spoiled, self-centered heiress out of touch with the realities of the world. In the end, she finally sees the unsuitability of her fortune-hunter and exchanges him for another man whom she at first found just as unsuitable, but finally comes to realize is actually just the right choice for her.

Capra is sometimes considered the King of Screwball Comedy, but except for You Can't Take It With You (and that movie is based on a popular play), he never really repeated anything approximating this formula again. Instead, he veered into making comedies with a social conscience and a more sentimental undertone, movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe. His attempt at black comedy, Arsenic and Old Lace (also based on a popular play), is a movie I find labored, overly frenetic, and at times almost tedious. (How many times can one watch Uncle Teddy race up the stairs yelling "Charge!" before the charm wears off?)

His last great work, It's a Wonderful Life, admittedly both a popular and artistic masterpiece, is a very melancholic movie that isn't really a comedy at all. A few Christmases ago, I watched a severely truncated version of this film on a Spanish-language TV channel. Running less than an hour in its entirety, it consisted mostly of the mid-section of the unedited film, the parts describing George Bailey's vision of what life would be like if he had indeed never been born and his horrified reactions when everyone he encounters really does treat him as though he had never existed. Everything before this was reduced to a couple of scenes, as was everything after. The effect was unnervingly like watching an especially macabre episode of The Twilight Zone.

A good example of the typical screwball comedy is the second version of Holiday (1938), directed by George Cukor. Here, when Cary Grant comes to meet the family of his rich, conventional, and dull fiancée, he unexpectedly encounters her alcoholic brother (Lew Ayres) and her rebellious sister (Katharine Hepburn). Both are suffering from an obvious case of inadequate parental affection and consciously chosen arrested development. (Much of the movie takes place in their childhood nursery, a place of refuge for these sibling misfits). By the end of the movie, they (especially Hepburn) have persuaded Grant to reject their sister and a life of comfortable but unexciting wealth as a drone in the family corporation. He opts instead to see the world and exchanges his original fiancée for the adventurous and unconventional Hepburn. One unsuitable mate is swapped for another who at first seemed unsuitable herself but turns out to be exactly right for Grant's newfound values and his newly acquired craving for excitement and unpredictability in life.

By about 1940, the screwball approach to comedy had become so ubiquitous, and had produced so many mediocre movies, that it was in real danger of running its course. The choice confronting the main characters in romantic comedies was becoming less and less one between freedom and conformity and was instead beginning to revert to the conventional romantic choice based on temperament and sexual attraction. (Of course, sex had always been an implicit element of the classic screwball comedy: Cary Grant is sexy, exciting, and slightly dangerous; Ralph Bellamy most definitely isn't.)

Filmmakers looking for ways to prolong the life of the genre, however, came up with inventive variations of the basic situation. In My Favorite Wife (1940) Cary Grant's first wife (Irene Dunne), missing at sea for several years and just declared legally dead, turns up right after his wedding to his second wife. This situation provokes many farcical complications, including an unanticipated attack of jealousy on the part of Grant when he meets the hunky athlete (Randolph Scott) Dunne was stranded on the island with, before Grant finally acknowledges that he is still in love with her. The deus ex machina of his second marriage being ruled invalid in court saves the day, and the couple (it was always apparent to the audience that temperamentally, Dunne is more suited to Grant than his second wife) are at last reunited.

In The Lady Eve (1941) the intrepid Preston Sturges gave Barbara Stanwyck a most unusual dual role. In this film she plays both potential love interests for nerdy herpetologist Henry Fonda—gold-digging conwoman Jean Harrington, who is rejected by the rich Fonda, and the fictitious British aristocrat Lady Eve, whom she creates and impersonates to ensnare him for revenge. Sturges took even more audacious liberties with the genre in his 1942 masterpiece The Palm Beach Story. Here Claudette Colbert leaves inventor Joel McCrea not only for personal reasons—his disbelieving jealousy when she accepts money from the "Wienie King" with no strings so that he can build his bizarre invention, an airport suspended over a city on a net—but for practical reasons as well: she wants to marry a millionaire to finance the invention. She becomes engaged to an effete, hare-brained millionaire (Rudy Vallee) while his sex-crazed sister (a hilarious Mary Astor) pursues McCrea when he follows Colbert to Florida. In an outrageously surreal denouement, everybody gets their cake and eats it too when it turns out that McCrea and Colbert are both identical twins (thus explaining the enigmatic prologue to the movie, which apparently shows Colbert pushing herself into a closet and locking the door before rushing off to marry McCrea). McCrea and Colbert re-marry while Vallee and Astor marry the twins, in a triple wedding.

By the early 1940's the worsening situation in Europe, the entry of the U.S. into WW II, and the end of the Depression (class distinctions and the conflict between the rich and the poor had from the beginning often been important issues in the genre) made the screwball approach to comedy seem frivolous and irrelevant. But for nearly ten years, beginning with It Happened One Night, screwball dominated the comedic output of the Hollywood studios with absolute authority.

My favorite screwball comedies (in alphabetical order):
The Awful Truth, Leo McCarey (1937)
Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks (1938)
His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks (1940)
It Happened One Night, Frank Capra (1934)
Midnight, Mitchell Leisen (1939)
My Man Godfrey, Gregory LaCava (1936)
The Palm Beach Story, Preston Sturges (1942)
The Philadelphia Story, George Cukor (1940)
Twentieth Century, Howard Hawks (1934)

My second-favorites:
Bachelor Mother, Garson Kanin (1939)
Holiday, George Cukor (1938)
The Lady Eve, Preston Sturges (1941)
The More the Merrier, George Stevens (1943)
My Favorite Wife, Garson Kanin (1940)
Theodora Goes Wild, Richard Boleslawski (1936)
You Can't Take It With You, Frank Capra (1938)

American-style screwball comedy never seemed to catch on in Britain, but one outstanding British example ranks with the best of the American films:
I Know Where I'm Going, Michael Powell (1945)