Love Is a Battlefield

Twentieth Century

Every hey must have its day, and for the snap, crackle, and pop wow that was the screwball comedy, that day lasted a good decade. Sandwiched not so neatly between the introduction of the Hays Office's Production Code -- a sort of standard of morality all scripts had to comply with -- and the bleak beauty of film noir, the screwball comedy emerged in the mid-Thirties and reached its screwball summit in the mid-Forties. It was a genre devoted largely to love, though not the swoony, pinup-idol kind audiences were used to. Screwball love was, well, screwier: Man and woman were at war, armed not with bullets but with barbs, delectable little zingers lobbed from one enemy camp to another until a sort-of peace finally broke out in the final reel. (Sure, the lovers-not-fighters might be cooing in each other's arms come the finale, but there was no doubt another brawl was just a dry martini away.)

Clearly, the lovers were all crazy, but it was crazy-love at its most intoxicating. In its new free series, "Lunatics and Lovers: Screwball Comedy of the Thirties," the Austin Film Society has selected a cross-section of screwball's earlier and sometimes lesser-known wonders. The first in the series, Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (showing Jan. 15), provides one of the series' more emblematic examples of the genre, if only by dint of its leading man. Cary Grant stars in the 1937 comedy about a man and wife who divorce, then botch the others' attempts to remarry other suitors. The walking, talking definition of dapper, Grant is the quintessential screwball hero: Quick to the comeback, quick to the drink, and appealingly elegant (affluence was a consistent characteristic in screwball's protagonists), Grant appeared in some of the most beloved of the genre's offerings, from Bringing up Baby to His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story.

Of course, every hero has his heroine, and she was just as snappy as he. Claudette Colbert, Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne (who co-starred in The Awful Truth): They were snap incarnate, smart cookies who slung epithets -- never vulgar: remember the Hays Code -- as sharply as their male counterparts. Myrna Loy slung with the best of them, although her contribution to the AFS lineup, the wonderful detective story The Thin Man (screening Jan. 22), is a somewhat anomalous film. The first in a much-loved series of pictures, The Thin Man stars William Powell and Loy as Nick and Nora Charles, a husband and wife who are actually very much in love, and functionally so. (Thankfully, this condition does nothing to hamper their witty repartee.) Still, in between solving murders, the pair booze it up at an agreeably alarming rate and parade their money with typical high-society nonchalance -- they invite the murder suspects to a top-hat-and-tails dinner party.

Though affluence was typically a given in screwball comedy, it sometimes served as the catalyst for biting class commentary. The genre directors -- Lubitsch, Capra, Hawks, Cukor -- enjoyed some playful mockery of the upper class as much as the next person, but Gregory La Cava elevated the snubbing of class snobbery even further with his My Man Godfrey (which screens Feb. 5). William Powell stars again, this time with Carole Lombard, as a "forgotten man" -- an excessively gentle term no doubt concocted by the excessively genteel, who in this case couldn't be troubled to recognize someone for what he was, which was a homeless man. Powell, as the vagabond Godfrey, is taken in by a monied, miserable family as their butler and, in turn, turns them around from their stodgy, glass-house way of viewing the classes.

The AFS series runs Tuesday nights at the Arbor, except for the final screening, Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party, which shows March 5 at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown. Grab the mink stole, the martini, and the he/she you most love to hate to love, and make it a wild party of your own. Screwball comedy puts the fun in dysfunctional.