The Screwball Comedies of Howard Hawks
Author: David MacdonaldPublished on: Jul 3, 2000
Screwball comedy is a genre which was at the height of its popularity in the 1930`s and 1940`s. Unlike slapstick, screwball is known mostly for its verbosity – most of the humour is not in sight gags or other forms of physical comedy, but in the words the actors say. A typical screwball comedy may contain a number of common attributes: "wacky and oddball behaviour"*, or "role manipulation, either between the sexes or between the classes"*. These characteristics are usually present in the context of a romantic story, where the leads realize, despite tensions and hindrances of all kinds, that they were meant for each other.
The genre was a favourite of a number of directors, from Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, and Leo McCarey*. Howard Hawks was another practitioner of the genre. Hawks was responsible for a number of classic comedies, from His Girl Friday and I was a Male War Bride, to Bringing Up Baby. The films I`ve viewed are His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, and these two films represent the pinnacle of the genre. Both of them are fast-paced and frantic, rarely slowing down that pace for any hint of seriousness. Certainly, these movies ought to be seen as the beginnings of such lunatic comedy as can be found in movies by Jim Carrey and others. As in a Carrey film, the Hawks pictures employ many implausible and wacky situations, albeit not of the gross-out nature of, say, Dumb and Dumber. The wacky situations in the Hawks comedies include the events surrounding Katherine Hepburn`s leopard, Baby, in Bringing Up Baby, and the sorry situation of Rosalind Russel`s fiance in His Girl Friday, who constantly is set up by the jealous ex-husband Cary Grant to be arrested for numerous petty crimes. What makes these classics better (and more tasteful) then the current pictures is the sheen of sophistication over the silliness. With actors like Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Ralph Bellamy, and others as the leads, you know you are not entering the world of the Farrelly Brothers.
Bringing Up Baby is the earliest of the two films I`ve viewed (1938), and is definitely the wackiest of the two. Cary Grant is a scientist, attempting to complete a skeleton of a particular dinosaur. Grant is also about to be married to an equally scientific mind; she is, in fact, prepared to sacrifice the honeymoon in order to get straight back to work. On this particular day, Grant attempts to impress a representative of a rich person in order to secure a one million dollar grant to the museum. The deed is done in a suitable arena for business – the golf course. But this is where the havoc begins.
Katherine Hepburn plays a very strange woman, who makes a grand entrance by stealing a wandering golfball and playing it as her own. Grant, never having seen this woman in his life, now finds himself unable to complete his business deal and instead attempts to get this nutty person off his back, with no success. She not only steals his golfball, but also drives off with his car, creates a scene in a restaurant, and, later in the evening, knocks out accidentally (I think!!) the man whom Grant had been trying to impress. All of this has to be seen to be believed, and is only a summary of the first 15 minutes. There is in fact much more, including that of "Baby" herself, who is Hepburn`s leopard. This beast becomes responsible for a number of amusing scenes, and is very important to the chaotic climax.
Insanity is certainly a perfect element to this story, because without it there would only be the romance, which this movie does not take very seriously, and which would be somewhat pathetic is it did. My own impression at first was that Katherine Hepburn`s character was a grating nuisance, as she constantly makes shambles out of Cary Grant`s life and sanity. No filmmaker today would be able to avoid scorn with this depiction of a woman, but after a while, even Hepburn`s character grows on you. In a sense, she is a stalker, by attempting to shove herself into every situation and place which Grant is involved in, and by making herself appear the innocent. One great scene involves one of Hepburn`s attempts at shifting the blame for these catastrophes to Grant, when she asks the opinion of a psychiatrist about the fact that whenever Grant is around, bad things start to happen. The expert states that he is the one with the fixation, and that his obsession can only be expressed by conflict.
Overall, the romance in films like this are not depicted tenderly, but cynically. We see that love does not involve romantic bonds between two people, but manipulation and desperation. Our couple does get together at the end of the film, but only because Grant has been so worn down by Hepburn. He has given up trying to understand or escape this woman, so he falls in love. Of course, during the course of the film, we are not meant to feel any negative response, only to laugh, and this film succeeds in giving us that pleasure.
Hawks followed this film two years later with His Girl Friday, about the inner workings of the newspaper industry, and specifically about the tension which still exists between ex-spouses Cary Grant, editor-in-chief, and Rosalind Russell, star reporter. The film does not go to the greatest of lengths in terms of cinematic insanity that Bringing Up Baby did, but it still moves at a fast clip. Instead, the film places an even bigger emphasis on cynical representations of the world, especially romance.
In general, the newspaper world gets a lashing. Cary Grant himself is a very amoral, opportunistic editor, who would do anything in order to get what he wants. For example, even though the paper is a Democratic supporter, Grant is willing to print an editorial supporting the Republican mayor, so the newspaper will be granted their wish of a reprieve for an about-to-be-executed criminal. Grant then says they can go back to being a Democratic paper tomorrow. Many of the reporters of the city papers are portrayed as crooked as well. Throwaway scenes in which reporters keep topping each other with even bigger exaggerations of the truth are common during the course of the story. The forthright depiction of all kinds of tricky business necessitates a silly title card during the credits which tries to convince us that this movie does not reflect the real-life newspaper world of today (1940). Right!!!!
In the romantic department, Cary is equally persistent in getting his own way. Even after the divorce, he still attempts to woo the ex-wife, who claims to be frustrated by his behaviour and who is about to get married to Ralph Bellamy. While this is much more plausible than Katherine Hepburn`s pursuit of Grant, there is still a lot of manipulation and desperation, resulting in the wearing down of the other person`s defences. This occurs after Cary Grant has successfully stalled the new couple`s escape to married bliss by getting Bellamy in jail numerous times: once for carrying counterfeit money, another for associating with what appears to me to be a prostitute, and another for robbery. Of course, it is Grant who plants all this "evidence" on him, and is buying time so Russel will see the error of her ways and remarry Grant. Just as in Bringing Up Baby, the romantic world is seen through humourously cynical eyes.
The thing which is rather apparent to someone like me is that the people who made these films must have been on crack (or, if one knows a little bit about Cary Grant`s personal life, perhaps a bit of LSD as well!!)! The films themselves are crazy, and yet move like a piece of music, in that the insanity flows smoothly and gracefully. These films exist to make you laugh, and be entertained. They do not contain much in the line of sober thought, or the kind of romance you see in genuine love stories, but at the same time these films are not lacking in quality. There is usually comic inspiration everywhere in these two films, all of the performers are impressive, Rosalind Russell a personal favourite, and Cary Grant, in particular, gives some of his best performances in movies of this kind (although my favourite C. G. comedy is a later film, H. C. Potter`s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House). That is exactly why such films ought to be considered classics: they contain absolute purity of form. While many films of today, even comedies, feel the need to get mushy and solemn for the climax, the screwball comedies do not suffer the same urges. Almost every moment is touched by some sort of comedic inspiration, and you`ll never hear (at least in the Hawks films) weepy melodramatic score music. All you`ll hear is great talk, and all you`ll see is utter lunacy, which is what these films were meant to contain. These movies are romantic comedies in the truest sense, as the romance and the comedy are intertwined at every moment.
*More information on the genre can be found in the article Screwball Comedy (author unknown) http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~pswF94/cusp/n...