The so-called screwball comedy did not survive as a genre beyond that ndeterminate period in the thirties when the national economy supposedly encouraged certain patterns of eccentric behavior on the screen. Film historians have never quite agreed on exactly what constituted a screwball comedy or what movies qualified for the category. There has been general agreement, however, that the period in question did not begin much before 1934 or end much after 1938. One may begin with Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century or Frank Capra's It Happened One Night in 1934 and end with Hawks's Bringing Up Baby or Capra's You Can't Take It with You in 1938. Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936), Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), and William Wellman's Nothing Sacred (1937) would have to be added to the list as generally acknowledged classics of screwballism. But within this very narrow range of selection, we begin to encounter problems of definition. The one constant throughout the category is the teaming of a male star and a female star as both love interest and comic center of the spectacle. There is presumably no place in screwball comedy for Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy. Even so, can we then demonstrate that this particular policy began in 1934 and ended in 1938?  I would hardly think so. Some nuance seems to have eluded us. Let us therefore turn to some of the aforementioned film historians for possible clues to the alleged uniqueness of screwball comedy.

Lewis Jacobs in The Rise of the American Film establishes a dialectic between old-fashioned sentimentality and the new sophistication by applauding the supposed advanced tastes of movie audiences:

Cinderella, like Pollyanna, is distinctly out of style and even incredible.  Rich Man, Poor Girl (1938) was criticized as "trite"; Rims that show the heroine slopping from gutter to penthouse (Mannequin (1937), The Bride Wore Red (1937)) are no longer convincing. Remakes of such former domestic triangles such as Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938) and Angel (1937), with the philandering and faithfulness on which they pivot, seem old-fashioned and dated—unreal. . . .

"Daffy" comedies became the fashion. Here the genteel tradition is "knocked for a loop": heroes and heroines are neither [sic] lady-like and [sic] gentlemanly. They hit each other, throw each other down, mock each other, play with each other. It Happened One Night (1934) was the first successful example of this school. Twentieth Century (1934); My Man Godfrey (1936); and Theodora Goes Wild; Topper, True Confession; Live, Love awl Learn, and The Awful Truth (all 1937) similarly lampooned the dignified and accepted. These films were all sophisticated, mature, full of violence—hitting, falling, throwing, acrobatics—bright dialogue, slapstick action—all imbued with terrific energy. . . .

Emblematic of this new regard for the "wacky" are new hero and heroine types. Among the women Carole Lombard is the most outstanding in her "screwball" activity. Beautiful, frustrated, she asserts intense dissatisfaction with existing conventions and deep bewilderment in seeking justification of her desires. . . .

Among the men perhaps the most representative of the rebels are Fred MacMurray, Gary Grant, and Melvyn Douglas. These men are seekers of one sort or another; they point to maladjustments by pretending with childlike simplicity that they do not exist. They enter in conspiracies with themselves or comrades, telling long stories or building up long situations which are unconventional but which seem right. In Holiday Gary Grant turns cartwheels, with perfect English and restraint tells the heroine and the rich and dignified where to go, and dashes off and on the scene with a complete disdain of conventionality.

Jacobs spread his blanket of rhetoric across too many films and genres, and, in the process, lost sight of whatever it was that was unique about the "screwball comedy." For several decades his was the most authoritative reference work on the American cinema, with the result that his formulations were paraphrased in many subsequent texts. At times he was inclined to depend on no more than the title of the film to convey its mood and meaning—his superficial description of Gary Grant's role and function in Holiday, for example, is misleading in the extreme. For one thing, the Grant character is at heart less of a rebel than the Katharine Hepburn character. It is his inner conflict between a life of conformity with one sister (Doris Nolan) and a life-long holiday with the other (Hepburn) that provides the dramatic suspense of the film. Besides, Holiday (1938) is based on a twenties play by Philip Barry, and it is difficult therefore to see why its content should be especially relevant to the political climate of the thirties even with its inserted reference to John L. Lewis. In fact, the over-all mood of Holiday is more reflective and regretful than that of most of the so-called screwball comedies.  Grant's acrobatics are more pertinent to a special talent of the performer than to an ideological quirk of the character. And the film itself is almost totally insulated from the clamoring world outside, particularly with reference to a central character who wants to take off a few years from his work as a stockbroker for a "holiday" during which he can tour Europe in search of new ideas Out There. This is clearly more a dream of the twenties than the thirties. Certainly, with millions of people unemployed, how could this dilettantish dream of a holiday be granted any credence as a symptom of social consciousness?

One problem with a sociological interpretation of the cinema is that connections must be assumed between the screen and society even when seemingly no such connections exist. Because there was a Great Depression through the thirties, the movies of that period must reflect it even if they seem frivolous, escapist, and reactionary on the surface. Hence, Gary Grant's cartwheels (actually, somersaults) in Holiday must be transformed into revolutionary metaphors, even though his social attitude when he is standing upright is at best whimsically bourgeois. The entire genre, for that matter, is only fitfully concerned with the economic problems of the era. Nothing Sacred (1937), with its raucous send-up of the gullibility and sentimentality of the tabloid-transfixed public, could have been set in the twenties insofar as any explicit reference to bread lines and unemployment is concerned, Ben Hecht, the scenarist of Noting Sacred, had collaborated with Charles MacArthur in the twenties on the play The Front Page, the prototype of scoop-chasing farces and melodramas through the thirties. The cynical reporter hero in Nothing Sacred (in the persona of Fredric March) appears also in ft Happened One Night (in the persona of dark Gable), and is a familiar figure on the screen through good times and bad. Indeed, the screwball antics of journalists in the movies are so commonplace that they are consigned to a genre of their own.

To continue with Jacob's own examples, Twentieth Century is a backstage Pygmalion farce with sex and slapstick and much shouting and screaming, but with about as much "relevance" to the period as Pinero. True Confession,  as  a  courtroom-scandal-with-the-complicity-of-the- tabloid-press comedy, is descended from Maurine Watkins's 1927 play Chicago, from which a movie was made that year, and which was remade in 1940 as a Ginger Rogers romp entitled Roxie Hart. Bringing Up Baby (1938) is a wild, frenzied, savage comedy, but it takes place mostly in an upper-class milieu where money is no object. This is even more true of The Awful Truth (1937), a marital sex comedy in which the two leads clearly belong to Society, and flaunt residences in both town and country. Live, Love and Learn (1937) was warmed-over Noel Coward-ish bohemian craziness that dates back to the beginning of the so-called Jazz Age. Theodora Goes Wild (1936) alternates its action between a well-scrubbed small town and the upper echelons of Manhattan publishing. Topper (1937) is a whimsical ghost story in upper-class surroundings where people party to all hours. My Man Godfrey (1936) at least begins with an atmospheric awareness of the Depression by focusing on a picturesque city dump where the "forgotten men" of the Depression cluster for survival. A bearded, ragged William Powell plays a forgotten man who is first recruited for a silly society scavenger hunt, and then hired as the butler for an eccentric family. His romantic entanglement with the young lady of the family suggests at first a reworking of Barrie's interclass comedy. The Admirable Crichton, made into a movie by Cecil B.
DeMille in 1920 under the title of Male and Female. But as Graham Greene noted at the time. My Man Godfrey even cheats on the initial titillation of class conflict by making Godfrey a Boston Brahmin down on his luck rather than an authentic representative of the masses. Merrily We Live (1938), a transparent imitation of Godfrey, is even less responsive to the presumably proletarian stirrings of the Depression.

Andrew Bergman's We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films goes so far as to treat the screwball comedy as a reactionary trend, largely on a simplistic interpretation of the artistic decline of the Marx brothers between their Paramount peak as an anarchic force in Duck Soup and their domestication at MGM in A Night at the Opera:

A new kind of comedy became popular in 1934, with the unexpected and gigantic success of Frank Capra's It Happened One Night. Labeled "screwball" comedy, it stressed a breezy nuttiness that worked to pull things (marriages, social classes) together, rather than break them apart. It dominated film comedy for the rest of the decade. At another time, maybe the Grouchos could assume power, but for the time being they were relegated to more limited spheres. The public still loved the Marxes, so long as they knew their place. In A Night at the Opera, Groucho plays a jobless opera impresario; in A Day at the Races, a seedy horse doctor; in Room Service, a penniless Broadway producer.

In The Movies, a picture book by Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer, there is a societal summation in prose of a four-page illustrated section called "Screwball Comedy":

But both The Thin Man and It Happened One Night featured something new to the movies—the private fun a man and a woman could have in a private world of their own making. A new image of courtship and marriage began to appear, with man and wife no longer expecting ecstatic bliss, but treating the daily experience of living as a crazy adventure sufficient to itself. And if what went on in these private worlds was mostly nonsense, what sense could be found in the great world outside, where economic crisis and the threat of approaching war barred all the conventional roads to achievement and happiness? It is hard to describe today what these films meant to a depression-bred generation, and it is not surprising that the "screwball comedies," as they came to be called, usually ended in slapstick or violence. They mirrored a world of frustration.

Unfortunately, there is nothing in the material above about the screwball comedy that could not apply equally well to Noel Coward's Private Lives. But Griffith and Mayer at least acknowledge courtship and marriage as the dominant narrative elements, and their correlation of slapstick and violence with frustration is another step in the right direction. In the context of their argument it is fairly clear, however, that they attribute "frustration" in the screwball comedies to the "economic crisis" and "the threat of approaching war." But an analysis of the content of all the screwball comedies mentioned thus far reveals surprisingly little awareness in the characters of either an "economic crisis" or "a threat of approaching war." Even when we add the idiosyncratic examples of Griffith and Mayer to those of Jacobs and Bergman, we unearth only more evidence on screen of privilege and guiltless hedonism. Nick Charles in The Thin Man (1934) makes most of his income by "managing" wife Nora's sizable investments. Barbara Stanwyck in and as The Mad Miss Manton (1938) plays a spoiled society girl who meddles in police investigations of murders. Joy of Living (1938) is literally escapist as it demonstrates how a successful musical comedy star (Irene Dunne) with a family of leeches is lured away to a desert island by a charmingly aimless playboy (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.)- Friends of Mr. Sweeney (1934), a very genial and sophisticated muckraking and heavy-drinking bacchanal, is not technically eligible for the genre because the protagonist is played by the character actor Charlie Ruggles, while Hired Wife is too late (1940) and too gimmicky to qualify.

What then is the source of "frustration" in the screwball comedies? I would suggest that this frustration arises inevitably from a situation in which the censors have removed the sex from sex comedies. Here we have all these beautiful people with nothing to do. Let us invent some substitutes for sex. The aforementioned wisecracks multiply beyond measure, and when the audience tires of verbal sublimation, the performers do somersaults and pratfalls and funny faces. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby (1938) dig for a dinosaur bone on a Connecticut estate and pursue a pet leopard all the way into a small-town jail reminiscent of the Keystone Kops. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert pass the time in It Happened One Night (1934) with cutesy debates on the arts of dunking, hitchhiking, and riding piggyback. Myrna Loy and William Powell get laughs in The Thin Man (1934) by pausing in front of every tree, post, and hydrant while their dog presumably does his business below the frame of the film. Carole Lombard and Fredric March haul off and sock each other in Nothing Sacred (1937). James Stewart and Jean Arthur turn a night club upside down in the name of non-conformity in You Can't Take it with You (1938). Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in The Awful Truth (1937) romp through a series of slapstick situations that would have given pause to Laurel and Hardy. From 1934 on it does not matter whether the couple is married or not: the act and the fact of sex are verboten. The nice naughtiness which characterized such early thirties comedies as Laughter (1930) and Trouble in Paradise (1932) and The Guardsman (1931) and Reunion in Vienna (1933) and Design for Living (1933) were supplanted by the subterfuges of screwballism. Even the seductive dance duets of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers may have been inspired at least partly by the need to discover a language of motion and gesture that would allow them to circumvent their sexual frustrations.

Jacobs was not aware of all the thematic and stylistic implications of his dismissal of Angel (1937) and Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938) as old-fashioned "philandering." Both films were produced by Ernst Lubitsch's unit at Paramount, and Bluebeards Eighth Wife, which he directed, particularly seems to possess more of the properties of a screwball comedy than many of the movies on Jacob's list. Working with a relatively harsh and sardonic script by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, the usually suave Lubitsch has ventured into new realms of cruel, humiliating frustration in the battle of the sexes, a battle in which the much-married modern Bluebeard (Gary Cooper) is virtually driven insane by the shrewdly teasing tactics of his eighth wife (Claudette Colbert). Angel is much gentler and more delicate, but it insists as late as 1937 that adultery is still a reasonable option for a civilized woman.

Why should these two films be considered failures, and the screwball comedies be considered successful? Jacobs has not produced box-office figures, but he does quote the published remarks of exhibitors in such journals of hick opinion as the Motion Picture Herald and Harrison's Reports. It is curious that historians like Jacobs can at one and the same time condemn Hollywood for being too "commercial" and yet endorse movies ideologically simply because they are "popular." It seems that the studios can do no right, and audiences no wrong. Furthermore, the sociological film historian can transfer his own tastes to the people without acknowledging any personal bias.

But for every screwball comedy that we remember fondly today, there are at least ten that would make us grind our teeth over the witless shenanigans of unfunny farceurs. The grounds for our admiration are therefore more stylistic than ideological. Certain directors, certain writers, and, above all, certain comediennes suddenly materialized on the scene with a mastery of a self-contradictory genre, the sex comedy without sex. Ernst Lubitsch had been making sly, witty sex comedies in Hollywood since 1925, and he had developed an elliptical style of closed doors and deadpan reaction shots with which to wink at the subject.  Still, this was not enough for American puritanism. In order to make his intrigues palatable to the provincials, he had to indulge in the fiction of "Continental" locales, most often Gay Paree. His players, like Sternberg's in romantic melodrama, became increasingly stylized until Marlene Dietrich in Angel evolved as a maze of masked ambiguities. Unfortunately, by 1937, the sex could only be hinted at in the most guarded tones. It was there, but in such a subdued state that audiences were no longer amused or titillated. Certain stars were on the rise, and certain stars were being denounced as box-office poison. Marlene Dietrich was considered box-office poison, but for a time so was Katharine Hepburn, and Joan Crawford. They all came back once they had altered some aspect of their image or switched genres. There was a trend away from exotic, upper-class, foreign types toward exuberant, middle-class, all-American types. Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, and Myrna Loy were in the ascendant. This did not prevent Luise Rainer from winning two Academy Awards for tear-jerking performances in the most impeccably Continental manner. Nor did the supposed vogue for joyously non-philandering screwball comediennes between 1934 and 1938 prevent Bette Davis for winning two Oscars of her own for her two wicked temptresses in Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938). The point is  that one genre did not supplant another;  the good movies  simply eclipsed the bad ones.

There are a few constants for screwball comedy. First, children almost never exist, and babies absolutely never. The child-cult conventions of the thirties mandated "dramatic" treatment of child-custody problems. The Awful Truth goes so far as to exploit the absence of children in a divorce proceeding by waging a comical battle over custody of the dog. The "baby" in Bringing Up Baby is, of course, a leopard. The Thin Man notwithstanding, the great majority of screwball comedies save marriage for the final fade-out or even beyond. Screwball comedies are therefore generally comedies of courtship, and they may have been considered prescient for anticipating the quarrels that characterize most real marriages.

Howard Hawks once claimed that Twentieth Century (1934) was the first Hollywood comedy in which the romantic leads got their own laughs without the help of a pack ofvaudevillians. This may not be entirely true since Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns are on hand in Twentieth Century as they are in It Happened One Night, and middle-aged character buffoons were to be featured prominently in all thirties comedies, not just to make audiences laugh but to satisfy the audience's notion of common sense and mature wisdom. The last shot of Nothing Sacred is not of Carole Lombard and Fredric March embracing on the deck of an ocean liner, but of Charlie Winninger below in his stateroom, deep in his cups, hallucinating through his porthole that the "hotel lobby" was flooded. Nonetheless, Hawks was correct in his emphasis, and no other director went to such lengths to put his romantic leads through their paces. Yet, curiously, neither Twentieth Century nor Bringing Up Baby was overly successful with audiences in their own time, and these two films were clearly the maddest and most savage confrontations between the sexes. Frank Capra tended to complicate the screwball comedy, first with populist vaudeville (in It Happened One Night) and then gradually with populist melodrama in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, until finally by the time of Meet John Doe in 1941 the melodrama had completely engulfed the comedy. Hawks, however, stuck with the primal man-woman struggle throughout his career, and his comedies remain the most audacious in examining the possibilities of role-reversal and sexual metaphor.

Leo McCareys The Awful Truth is the most accomplished of all the screwball comedies in terms of the behavioral charm and breeziness of the humor, and Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey achieves a genuinely eccentric atmosphere with the least cruelty and violence. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to establish hard and fast boundaries for the genre. Why has no one hitherto mentioned Three-Cornered Moon (1933) with its whimsical treatment of a spoiled rich family goofily adjusting to the loss of its wealth in the Crash? The Paramount cycle of romantic farces with Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert matched up in various combinations with Fred MacMurray, Robert Young, and Meivyn Douglas also made its contributions to the genre.

But if we are to isolate one factor above all others it would have to be the presence in Hollywood at one time of an incredible assortment of gifted comediennes with a variety of trick voices, insinuating mannerisms, and unearthly beauty. There was Irene Dunne, getting a little too close to forty, sometimes a bit too knowing, and her derisively drawling laugh too close to Lynn Fontannes, but nonetheless with a prodigious warmth. There was Jean Arthur with her bewitchingly bewildered cadences and working-girl beauty—and why has no one mentioned Mitchell Leisen's Easy  Living (1937) and Remember the Night (1940) from Preston Sturges scripts? There was Myrna Loy, of course, and Barbara Stanwyck, and a little later, Rosalind Russell. Ginger Rogers and Katharine Hepburn staged their famous confrontation in Stage Door (1937), Rogers the incarnation of the shop girl who rose to stardom, and Hepburn the rebellious rich girl who did not play by the rules. By contrast, the only actor indispensable to the genre was Gary Grant, whose strange mixture of shy, nervous detachment and clownish bravado fit into the underlying uncertainty of the sexual byplay in screwball comedy.

Grant was the first big star to escape bondage to a single-studio long-term contract though it has never been made clear which, if any, of his first twenty-six movies (before The Awful Truth) gave him the power to call his own shots. Mac West has tried to claim credit for "discovering" Grant for She Done Him Wrong (1933), but he had already made seven movies before the West come-on certified his stud status. The late George Cukor insisted that Sylvia Scarlett (1936) put Grant over with the moguls. Since the movie itself was such a commercial and critical dud at the time, and contributed mightily to making Katharine Hepburn "box-office poison," Cukors assertion seems downright bizarre. Nor did Grant's involvement with Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg in Blonde Venus (1932) do much for his own image. Although he was listed in casts with such yesteryear icons as Carole Lombard, Sylvia Sidney, Tallulah Bankhead, Jean Harlow, Frances Farmer, and even Grace Moore, he was most effective in a light-fun way with Nancy Carroll in Hot Saturday (1932) and The Woman Accused (1933), and with Joan Bennett in Big Brown Eyes and Wedding Present (both 1936). Topper (1937), with Constance Bennett as his after-life consort, and with Roland Young as the eponymous survivor of this otherworldly farce-fantasy, helped establish a certain high society gloss for his persona, but was otherwise by far the least endearing and enduring of the "classic" screwball comedies.

Then came the one shot more than any other that provides the visual cue for the screwball era. It occurs early on in Leo McCareys The Awful Truth when Grant is seen seated on the top of a luxurious sofa, his right elbow balanced casually on his right knee, which is bent over the sofa's arm-rest, while his left arm is extended to his left knee, which is bent over the seat-cushions. His shoes are thereby pressing rudely on the upscale upholstery as part of a posture of infantile irresponsibility. Off to his right stands Irene Dunne, as his wife, still swathed in ermine after a night out with her "music teacher," a perfectly type-cast snake-in-the-grass in evening clothes (Alexander D'Arcy). Two other couples are standing at either side of the frame, along with a seated but skeptical aunt (Cecil Cunningham) in the center, as witnesses to this early-morning-after marital misunderstanding.

The one conspicuously askew element is that of Grant, perched unconventionally in what would otherwise have been a traditional Coward-Maugham-Barry-Behrman drawing room tableau of suspected infidelity. The acrobatics of Archie Leach combined with the acquired sophistication of Gary Grant proved time and again thereafter that the rich need not be stuffy and stodgy in manner. The talkies had found at last a well-tailored romantic gentleman with the physical gifts of a baggy-pants comic. It was not just a matter of the pratfalls and somersaults Grant performed throughout his career, but innumerable bits of business that tilled this part of his body and that in some speedy Hash of behavioral vaudeville.

On the distaff side, the one image, the one voice, the one kinetic force and exquisite surface that came to mind at the time in a flash of feeling was that of Carole Lombard. It can be argued that she started the genre off with Twentieth Century in 1934, and in effect, ended it in 1939 when Life Magazine announced that the screwball comedy had gone out of style at the moment that Lombard began sobbing on the screen in Made for Each Other when she spotted an oxygen tank being wheeled into her baby’s hospital room.  In happier times, she could sidle up to a man in her clinging gown without seeming either a clinging vine or a voracious vamp.  Lombard always gave something extra to her movie roles, so far transcending them with her luminous beauty that she stands outside them today as a figure of speech for all the sublime imagery that co-existed with the mundane, middle-class homilies of thirties movie scenarios.