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Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934-1945
Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals
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A 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Love at first sight, whirlwind marriages, break-ups, divorces, remarriage… What accounts for the enduring success of the Hollywood madcap comedies of the 1930s? Directed by masters of comedy (Hawks, LaCava, Leisen, Ruggles...) and featuring the decade’s most iconic stars (Colbert, Dunne, Grant, Hepburn...), these films set romantic comedy standards for decades to come. Screwball comedy embarked on two challenging missions: to poke fun at established social norms and to undermine stereotypical depictions of gender roles, putting forward a discourse that postulated the possibility of equality between men and women. Grégoire Halbout’s reexamination of screwball comedy provides a comprehensive overview of this (sub)genre, eschewing the auteurist approach and including “minor” works never before analyzed through the screwball lens. His book explains how these screwball stories met the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for the liberalization of morals, with daring plots, verbal humor and slapstick techniques. Building on the work of Cavell, Altman and Gehring, as well as international and French scholarship, Halbout’s investigation unfolds in three parts. He first establishes a definition of Hollywood screwball comedy through a cross-sectional analysis of its socio-historical context and an in-depth examination of the genre. He then situates screwball comedy in relation to its institutional context. An exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic meant to subvert the prohibitions of the 1934 Hollywood Production Code through a verbal and visual rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre’s placement of romantic intimacy at the center of the public sphere and the democratic debate, confirming that screwball eccentricity upholds America’s founding values: freedom of speech, free consent, and contractual engagement.
About the Author:
Grégoire Halbout is Emeritus Associate Professor of English and Cinema at the University of Tours, France. He writes in French and English about Hollywood comedy and the social function of cultural industries, as well as gender and sexuality in contemporary film and television.
Press Reviews:
"Halbout's Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945 is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to define the genre and catalog its examples … it's carefully argued, contains a wealth of insight, and is refreshingly broad-minded." ―New York Review of Books
"The book is smartly written and deeply researched, and it joins foundational work by such scholars of the genre as Stanley Cavell, Kathrina Glitre, and Wes Gehring ... This indispensable book will be valuable for those interested in screwball comedies or Hollywood history. Summing Up: Essential. All readers." ―CHOICE
"A rigorous and nuanced work which constantly brings to light the complexities of a highly unstable genre that captured many contemporary ideological challenges … a fresh and insightful perspective." ―Miranda
"The result of Halbout's insightful analysis is a stimulating appreciation of a beloved genre in American film." ―Journal of American Culture
"[The] book will be particularly relevant to scholars of American humor because of its unique interdisciplinary approach to genre studies. It is a much-needed addition to the comedy corpus, for as much as the screwball genre was a reflection of a specific historical moment, Halbout shows that there is also a certain transcendent quality about its style, themes, and democratic aspirations." ―Olympia Kiriakou, Studies in American Humor
"Synthesizing major strands of French and English-language scholarship on the theatrical and cinematic traditions of romantic comedy, Grégoire Halbout's Hollywood Screwball Comedy,1934-1945 offers a fresh and lively reappraisal of Hollywood screwball comedies as a distinctly American film genre. The scope of his approach alone is impressive. Adroitly side-stepping the pitfalls of genre studies that are limited to the inspection of a handful of celebrated films, Halbout identifies and explores an expansive corpus, one with permeable boundaries and in flux throughout the years bridging the Great Depression and the Second World War. With exactness, he also dives deeply into the records of Production Code Administration to demonstrate how evolving censorship practices in Hollywood triggered the emergence of new visual and verbal comic styles. He charts a cultural discourse crisscrossed with contradictory and conflicting voices, echoing public debates about sex, intimacy, and marriage at a time when a democratic mythos was under great strain. Brought to light in these pages are the institutional practices and creative responses through which the dialects and effects of 'screwball' surfaced and flourished on and beyond the screen." ―Charles Wolfe, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
"Initiated and propelled by the writing of Stanley Cavell, Grégoire Halbout offers here a capacious yet discerning analysis of the remarkably fecund genre known by the disarming, perhaps misleading name "screwball." Delighting in the glories of taking democratic entertainment seriously, Halbout treats readers to a lively taxonomy of the characteristics and criteria that make these films recognizable, including savvy assessments of the many directors who artfully troped love and sex into conversation-thereby eliding with comic flair the chaste restrictions of the Hays Code. Moreover, despite the madcap and zany attributes of these plots and their characters, pursuits of happiness-in their many incarnations-remain of immanent concern for one and all, on screen and off. In Halbout's company, we contend with the exigencies of marriage; the charged private and public spaces of intimacy and power; and the vexed romance of democracy. To these ends, Halbout seizes upon the narrative traits that keep these indelible films fresh, while encouraging us to ponder how and why they proliferated. Though readers familiar with Cavell's contributions will recognize "his films" in the line-up, they will also encounter an expanse of additional works that thrill-placing the achievements of the marquee instances in dialogue with the lesser known. Befitting his signal inspiration, Halbout sustains Cavell's influential investigation and extends it in dynamic ways, delivering in this volume what amounts to a now-indispensable companion for exploring the moral and aesthetic incitements of the genre-especially among its hilarious and profound exemplars." ―David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA and editor of The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema and Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind
See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic
> On a related topic:
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Unexpected Connections
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