Thoughts on Genre: The Secret of Comedy (circa 1935)
After sitting through the weak screwball comedy
True Confession
this weekend, a proto-
I Love Lucy piece with Carole Lombard
doing her best to enliven the story of a pathological liar who
confesses to a murder she didn't commit to help make her lawyer
husband (an enervated Fred MacMurray) famous (along with a sad,
decaying John Barrymore in a thankless part as a drunk), I decided to
follow
Miranda's
lead and make a list of my favorite comedies of the thirties and
forties. I am not the expert that Ray Davis, who has
written
extensively on the subject, is, but since I realized I'd seen more
films of this genre than any other since I was obsessed with the
French nouvelle vague, I wondered if there was a connection. Leaving
aside the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, who represent their own
genre, here was my list, screwball and otherwise:
- The Palm Beach Story
- Twentieth Century
- Bombshell
- Nothing Sacred
- The Good Fairy
- Theodora Goes Wild
- Unfaithfully Yours
- Thirty Day Princess
- Sullivan's Travels
- The Lady Eve
That wasn't especially enlightening, so I made a list of the top ten
acclaimed comedies of the period that I didn't especially like.
- His Girl Friday
- Bringing Up Baby
- My Man Godfrey
- Adam's Rib
- It Happened One Night
- The Awful Truth
- Dinner at Eight
- Easy Living
- Miracle of Morgan's Creek
- Ball of Fire
This was more interesting. Several directors (Howard Hawks), actors
(Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne), and screenwriters (Ben Hecht) appeared
in both lists. Unlike the nouvelle vague, where rough rules like
"Louis Malle has never made a good movie" and "Truffaut's films tend
to be more recidivist than most" provided heuristics for predicting my reaction to a film, the heterogeneity of any
individual's output in American comedy was stronger than I can recall
it being anywhere else, even though the output was far more similar.
I don't believe this is purely due to the ineffable nature of
comedy. With the exception of "Ball of Fire," which is pretty hard to
take, all of the films on the second list are good pieces of work that
have their moments. Rather, I think that there is ultimately a
homogeneity of style and content that transcends the differences of
these movies to place them all firmly within a genre, a genre larger
than "screwball" but clearly isolatable to a time and place. What's
amazing is that there are so many that are estimable: I cannot think
of any other film genre that has so many high-quality films with such
similar content and formulae. (Some have suggested Bollywood musicals, but I wouldn't know.)
to be continued...
Posted by waggish at June 1, 2005 9:42 PM
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