Screwballed

Wendall -- every other Thursday

At the end of last year, my local library invited me to put together a presentation on romantic comedies for Valentine’s Day. Since I only had an hour and a half, I decided to focus on some of my favorite “cute meets” from the twentieth century, particularly the screwball ones.

Hepburn and Grant in Bringing Up Baby.

I didn’t know then that I would be editing rom/com clips with “go” bags by the door while Los Angeles, and perhaps democracy, burned. I felt incredibly guilty focusing on snappy banter and pratfalls, with upheaval and tragedy all around me. 

Stanwyck and Cooper in Ball of Fire.

With everything that was going on in Los Angeles, I was prepared for turnout to be low to non-existent. To my surprise, almost all the chairs were full as everyone settled in for scenes from Bringing Up Baby, Ninotchka, and The Lady Eve, Pat and Mike and Born Yesterday, Charade, What’s Up Doc? and Starting Over, and as many others as I could get through in the time.

The first "official" romantic comedy. It won 5 Oscars, including Best Picture.

 

An early "crime" rom/com.

An early "divorce" rom/com.

The next day, I received this email from a kind attendee: “What a joy to just sit with others and laugh. I needed that. I suspect we all did.” 

It set me to thinking how screwball comedy is actually all about chaos and how love can come from grappling with and accepting it in others and in the world around us. 

Barbra Streisand IS chaos in What's Up Doc?

Some of the greatest Billy Wilder banter, ever. Love the tag line: "Don't pronounce it- see it!"

Screwball comedy was largely born out of two things. First it was a response to the Production or Hays Code which sought to  “clean up” the movies, after pressure from national political, civic, and religious groups threatened to shut Hollywood down. The code, which had a list of Don’ts and Be Carefuls was created in 1930 and was enforced in earnest by 1934.  

 

Jean Harlow's lingerie and bedroom scenes in Red Dust were out.

 

Pajamas and physical fights were in, here between Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in Twentieth Century.

Second, it rose out of the need of those who were barely surviving the depression for stories about optimism, and redemption. So, to fulfill the “code,” filmmakers sublimated the sexual content of their comedies into couples who expressed their attraction through battling physically and verbally, straight through until the happy ending the public was starved for. And this sublimation + hope gives the films an energy that, in my opinion, has never been duplicated.

 

Double happy ending in The Philadelphia Story.

Screwball comedy, in the words of Ed Sikov, author of Screwball: Hollywood’s Madcap Romantic Comedies, is ". . .a whole genre developed around the perverse idea that love could only be enhanced by aggravation. . .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.... For these comedies were in essence voyages of self-discovery, fed by the Protestant work ethic: to make romance palatable, men and women had to earn it, and each other....Only by going through a terrible ordeal can genuine progress be made in a screwball comedy."

 

Possibly the greatest rom/com fight ever, in Nothing Sacred.

This tradition leads to some great slaps in the 80s, including in When Harry Met Sally and this one from Moonstruck:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLgMFwStTHc

The added bonus of these of the 30s and 40s films is their strong, hilarious female leads. Most of the romantic comedy heroines of the period were sophisticated, confident, and sexually and emotionally experienced. They were persuasive, impulsive, physical, and overwhelmingly fun. They embodied, in effect, the life force. 

 

Irene Dunne runs circles around Cary Grant in The Awful Truth.

 

Barbara Stanwyck is a clever con woman in The Lady Eve.

Myrna Loy detects with William Powell in The Thin Man.

If you’re looking for women with “agency,” who completely own their sexuality, I dare you to find finer examples than Irene Dunne’s Lucy in The Awful Truth, Rosalind Russell’s Hildy in His Girl Friday or Barbara Stanwyck’s Jean in The Lady Eve and Sugarpuss O’Shea in Ball of Fire.

 

Barbara Stanwyck's cabaret moll in Ball of Fire.

Rosalind Russell's ace reporter in His Girl Friday.

Writer/Director Preston Sturges created many of these women and he also understood the value of comedy. In Sullivan’s Travels he creates a film director who wants to do a “significant” film that reflects the times. 

A vital tome for anyone who wants to write comedy screenplays.

Here’s an early scene from the film well worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7WmhkO_GWI

And here’s a bit of the script if you don’t have time to check out the clip: 

"Maybe they'd like to forget that."

In the end, Joel McRae’s film director learns that laughter is a crucial commodity, never more so than in hard and terrifying times.

So, if you need a break from the news cycle, or you need to see something chaotic come out okay, I’d highly suggest some screwball.   And of course, if you want to jump to the 80s, you can revisit my inspiration for the Cyd Redondo novels, Romancing the Stone.

Watch this space, since I'm inspired to put together a Rom/Com webinar for the spring.

-- Wendall

Queen For an Hour and a Half

 Wendall -- every other Thursday

 

Living in Los Angeles has many delights, not the least of which is frequently passing, or entering, famous movie locations.

The Bradbury Building from the top floor.

 

I will never forget my first time inside the legendary Bradbury Building in downtown LA. You may recognize it from Blade Runner, The Artist, 500 Days of Summer, or, if you are a cop and you’ve done something dodgy, the former offices of Internal Affairs for the LAPD. This building deserves its own post, which I will write another day, and was inspired by a message on a Ouija board.

 

The Bradbury, halfway down.

I’ve had waffles in the coffee shop from Swingers, martinis in the Pretty Woman hotel, high tea in the Biltmore (recognizable from Ghostbusters to Mad Men),

 

The lobby staircase in the Biltmore Hotel. Betty Draper came down these stairs in Mad Men.

green corn tamales at El Coyote from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, dumplings at The Prince (Chinatown and Thank You For Smoking), and driven past the Hightower Apartment Buildings from The Long Goodbye and Dead Again—Michael Connelly also lived there.

 

The Hightower Apartments

 

Buildings on my street have appeared in Mulholland Drive and Lethal Weapon and my first LA apartment’s lobby appeared in Body Double.

 

The list goes on and on.

 

However, last week in Key Largo, Florida, I experienced something infinitely more profound, at least for me. I took an hour and a half cruise on the honest-to-god African Queen. 

 

At the dock.

Yes, the actual boat used in the 1951 film itself. The movie, based on the novel by C. S. Forester, garnered Bogart his only Oscar and is one of my favorites.

 

The original novel.

 

So, sitting on the same bench where Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart( and wife Lauren Bacall), and director John Huston once sat, moved me more than I expected.

 

 

We arrived on a windy day, which limited how far we went out into the Atlantic. We did travel far enough, though, for me to realize how low it sits in the water and to appreciate a bit of what it must have been like for those actors.

 

Sitting in front on a choppy day and James holding onto his bottle of gin. My hair is in the lower right.

 

According to Captain Dave, our host, the boat still used a steam engine until recently. The apparatus is still there, but he says it’s a lot quieter now. It still has a bell, that cranky engine, the original black mahogany benches, and permission from the Royal Navy to fly a torn Union Jack.

 

Captain Jack, James, and that bell.

 

The engine, sadly not the original, but still...

Not every boat gets to rip the Union Jack.

 

The boat has quite a history. It was built in England in 1912 for the East Africa British Railways company and carried hunting parties, missionaries, and supplies across Lake Albert and down the Victoria Nile in the Congo, until it was bought by John Huston for the film. According to Katherine Hepburn’s account in The Making of the African Queen or How I went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and almost lost my mind, the boat actually sank to the bottom of the Ruiki river during filming.

 

John Huston delivered the news to Hepburn, saying “she’s at the bottom, just the top of the boiler showing.”  When Hepburn asked what happened to the man who was guarding it, Huston told her that when he saw it was leaking, he got off.

 

Crew pulling the boat out. Copyright Horizons Mgmt.

 

Apparently it took the entire cast and crew, pulling on a cable wrapped around a tree, to pull up the boiler. As that was the heaviest part, once it was ashore, the boat resurfaced, but it took two days to bail her out. Then they cleaned up the mud and removed and restored the engine while the boat dried. Eventually, they were able to resume shooting.

 

After the film, the boat, now officially named The African Queen, stayed in service in Africa until 1968, when she was bought by a San Francisco restaurant owner for charter tours. In 1970, it was bought for charters in Oregon and was so successful there that owner Hal Bailey brought it to Florida for year-round tours.

 

Eventually it went out of service and was found in a Florida cow pasture by the late attorney Jim Hendricks, Sr.—a Bogart fan. Hendricks restored this piece of film history and started tours running out of the Key Largo Holiday Inn in 1982. 

 

On the Thames.

 

In New York and Sydney.

He also shipped it all over the world—for the Queen Mother’s 90^th birthday celebration and the 50^th anniversary of Dunkirk, and to Ireland, New York, and Sydney. Its original engine lasted until 2001.

 

Dunkirk Plaque.

 

The current lease holders, Captain Lance and Suzanne Holmquist of Calypso Sailing, restored it for its hundredth anniversary. It is now registered as a National Historic Site, albeit a floating one.

 

There are many famous film items in the new Motion Picture Academy Museum—E. T. , Dorothy’s shoes, the model shark from Jaws—but none that let you climb aboard.

 

Worth the trip.

 

 -- Wendall