Why modern-day romcoms can’t match the zing of Hollywood screwball romances

Around this time of year, in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, streamers and broadcasters pack their schedules with romantic dramas and comedies. If you want to see Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio kissing on the prow of the ship in Titanic or Renee Zellweger choosing between love rat Hugh Grant and the dashing Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’s Diary, now is the time. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are again conducting their long-distance love affair in Sleepless in Seattle while Richard Gere’s dapper businessman and Julia Roberts’ “working girl” are back having their Cinderella-like trysts in Pretty Woman.

The one characteristic these films share is a very soft centre. They all turn into tearjerkers by the final reel and the schmaltz is laid on very thick. Those who prefer their romcoms with more of an acerbic kick have only one real alternative: they must look back towards the screwball films made in Hollywood from the early 1930s to the mid-1940s.

You won’t hear lachrymose ballads crooned by Celine Dion or Whitney Houston in movies like Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, My Man Godfrey, It Happened One Night, or The Lady Eve. These films are anarchic, frequently violent, and very funny. They have strong female protagonists played by formidable stars like Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, and Claudette Colbert. The men who become entangled with them, portrayed by the likes of Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, look frightened and bewildered in their presence. 

For couples in screwball comedies, falling in love means embracing the chaos. Courtship and dating are shown as reckless pastimes in which social humiliation and physical embarrassment are both inevitable.

“The mating games played within their frames were testimonials to the fact that the choice of a partner – the most important choice people ever make – is nothing less than earthshaking, an assertion of one’s deepest instincts and destiny through love, a leap of faith into the void,” says critic Molly Haskell about the primitive mating urges that screwball comedies tap into with such malevolent glee.

The films have a verbal velocity that mealy-mouthed modern-day romcoms simply can’t match. It’s not just the barbed nature of the dialogue that startled contemporary audiences. So does the machine gun-like speed with which it is delivered. When Carole Lombard or Rosalind Russell are in full flow, the men simply can’t get a word in edgeways. 

For His Girl Friday (1940), director Howard Hawks had his cast, led by Russell as the ace reporter Hildy Johnson and Grant as the manipulative editor trying to spike her marriage, speaking at 240 words a minute. As Hawks’s biographer Todd McCarthy notes, that’s around double the “average speaking rate of 100-150”. The actors overlapped sentences, starting off on their own patter before their partner had finished talking. 

You won't find many contemporary actors either who can emulate the imperious hauteur of Hepburn (nicknamed “Katharine of Arrogance”) in Bringing Up Baby (1938) or the sleek feline malevolence of Stanwyck, preying on Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve (1941).

The origins of the genre are murky. No one set out self-consciously to create a new style of filmmaking called the “screwball”. As historian Ed Sikov notes in his comprehensive book on “Hollywood’s madcap romantic comedies”, the term comes from baseball where it is used to describe “an erratic pitch produced in an exact and deliberate way”. Such a pitch was designed to bamboozle the batter.

Screwball films emerged at the tail end of the Depression and at the start of a new age of censorship. Under the Motion Picture Production Code, which was enforced strictly from the summer of 1934 onwards, explicit references to sex were proscribed. Filmmakers were warned that the “sanctity of marriage” had to be upheld and “scenes of passion should not be introduced when not essential to the plot”. Depicting “low forms of sex relationship” was forbidden. 

Screwball comedies observed the letter of these laws but utterly flaunted their spirit. Instead of sex, they offered pratfalls, bangs, crashes, wallops, chases, hairpulling, and fight scenes. They are full of the kind of aggressive, infantile slapstick you find in Tom and Jerry cartoons. Would-be lovers may not be allowed to kiss but they can knock each other over. The more antagonistic they are, the more we know how deeply they are attracted to one another.

The men in the films are frequently humiliated in a ritualistic fashion. “Such a great receiver,” Hawks said admiringly of the way Grant soaked up punishment in screwball comedies, allowing his dignity to be shredded again and again in the name of the comic cause.

There's a memorable sequence early on in Bringing up Baby when the mild-mannered paleontology professor, played by Grant, slips on an olive dropped by wealthy heiress Hepburn. He lands on, and flattens, his own top hat.  The heiress asks him to hold her purse. It belongs to somebody else and he is promptly accused of theft. She accidentally rips his coat. He then equally accidentally stands on her dress, tearing a strip off and revealing her silken underwear. Mortified, he follows her around, using his crushed hat to hide her posterior from view. She has no idea she is exposed. He eventually decides the only way he can protect her dignity is to press his body firmly into her back. Censors who would have been aghast if the two characters had pecked each other on the cheek saw nothing wrong with the shenanigans. It was scenes like these that led US critic Andrew Sarris to describe screwball films as “sex comedies without the sex”.

Screwball films invariably included offbeat, surrealistic elements too. You might see a character taking a leopard for a walk down a packed city street in Bringing up Baby or high society folk in New York scouring shanty towns for homeless and destitute men to bring to a party in My Man Godfrey (1936). Such scenes wouldn’t have been out of place in one of Luis Buñuel’s art-house satires about the decadent bourgeoisie. These, though, were mainstream Hollywood studio movies, aimed at a mass audience. They were smart, cynical, and had a hard edge. Some of their protagonists were very rich. Some were very poor. None, though, ever gave in to the maudlin self-pity, soul searching, and narcissistic introspection that dampens so many contemporary romcoms and romantic dramas. 

In most of the films, one or other of the characters is on the make. Clark Gable’s journalist in It Happened One Night (1934) isn’t in love with the woman (Claudette Colbert) he accompanies across the country. He is after a scoop about a runaway heiress. In The Lady Eve (1941), Stanwyck’s con artist’s initial attraction is to the dweebish Henry Fonda’s fortune, not his good looks.

There is always attrition and simmering hostility between the would-be couples. That’s what sparks the comedy. The films are gleefully subversive, turning on their head traditional notions about good behaviour and happy families. Alcohol generally flows very freely. In My Man Godfrey, both William Powell and Lombard have scenes in which they are so hungover that they can’t remember what happened the night before.

In most screwball comedies, love blossoms very slowly, seemingly almost as an afterthought. The audience can see that couples are perfectly suited to one another but the couples themselves fail to recognise the fact until the closing credits are in sight. These screwball films are so quirky, abrasive, and unusual that they continue to fascinate academics and film curators who pore over them, trying to work out how and why Hollywood made them.

It was announced this week that several screwball classics will be screening at the Berlin Film Festival as part of a “No Angels – Mae West, Rosalind Russell & Carole Lombard” retrospective. 

“[They] have something to say to today’s audiences about what's going on right now. They explore timeless issues like reconciling love, career, and partnership while dealing with their own sexuality,” says Rainer Rother, head of the Berlinale Retrospective section and also artistic director of the Deutsche Kinemahtek, a German film museum and archive based in Berlin. The No Angels screenings will emphasise the way the three female stars “flouted and undermined the prevailing sex roles”.

One lingering question is just why the screwball genre exploded in the 1930s – and why it fizzled out a decade later. Bringing up Baby may have been a box office flop but many of the other films in the screwball cycle were hits and some won Oscars. They provided tremendous roles for their female stars. Audiences and critics loved them. From today’s vantage point, it seems utterly perverse to have stopped making them. 

Their influence lingers on but, by the mid-1940s, the screwball was becoming extinct. After Lombard, the genre’s most celebrated star, was killed in a plane crash in 1942, the appetite for making such films disappeared. By then, the memory of the Depression was receding, the war had started and the aggressive frivolity and inanity of the comedies were out of kilter with the times.

The heady mix of glamour, energy, cynicism and social satire that drove the best of the screwballs has never been recaptured. Modern-day equivalents seem flat and anodyne by comparison. That’s why those who like a little more zing in their romcoms are still far more likely to spend Valentine’s Day watching Bringing Up Baby than Notting Hill or Four Weddings and a Funeral. 

‘Bringing up Baby’ is available on BBC iPlayer. Retrospective ‘No Angels – Mae West, Rosalind Russell & Carole Lombard’ is at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival