How many good Screwball comedies are there? How many are even Screwball? Most might charitably be called Crazy Comedy (as here) or just farce. No hard and fast rules to the genre; you know it when you see one. I suppose you’ve got to have a flighty heiress (a bit nuts like Carole Lombard or just taking flight a la Claudette Colbert). And as antagonist/object of affection a sensible square to loosen up by the end. Most of all, you needed The Depression to ground all the craziness. That’s why they never work anymore. Hence, a ‘30s phenomenon.* Here, it’s already 1947 and writer Vera Caspary (best known for LAURA/’44 and LETTER TO THREE WIVES/’47) tries a quintette, two couples and a wild card. Apartment neighbors who bicker over a dog, tenant rights and a reappearing ‘dead’ body. Turhan Bey’s painter uncomfortably coming on to Virginia Mayo in his uncomfortably short shorts. Yikes! Prissy George Brent emasculated by wife Carole Landis. He gets Cary Grant’s hair, glasses & bow-tie from BRINGING UP BABY/’38*; she’s made-up as a Ginger Rogers clone. And the reappearing dead body? That’s Ann Dvorak who’s really only dead drunk. No comic technique, perhaps, but she wears you down and gets her laughs by the end. So too the film under journeyman director Leigh Jason; at least by the last reel and a half when everyone’s amusingly chasing their own tail and the background score finally stops acting like a musical laugh track.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *But what of the ‘40s Paramount heyday of Preston Sturges? Doesn’t THE LADY EVE/’41 meet all Screwball criteria? Sure, but his films are really a genre of their own: sui generis Sturges.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *BRINGING UP BABY flopped on release in ’38 and wouldn't have been known at the time. (Broadly rediscovered in the '70s.) Brent’s slightly fey look standard henpecked husband costume?
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