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Cracking Wise and Falling in Love (Again):
The Screwball Comedy
Taught by Andrew J. Douglas, Ph.D., Director of Education, BMFI

What do Katharine Hepburn’s wit, Cary Grant’s charm and Claudette Colbert’s glamour all have in common? They are in rare form in the screwball comedy. This course introduces students to the genre, also known as the “comedy of remarriage” because often, when boy meets girl and they fall in love, it is a road the two have gone down before.

But these films, most popular in the 1930s, are not just snappy patter and romantic hijinks. Beneath the surface they address important class, gender, and social issues, and do so with subtle aplomb under the watchful eye of the industry’s then-new regulatory agency, the Production Code Authority.

Join us to laugh (and think) along with the screwball classics that we will discuss, which include It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937), and Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938).

In these films, you, like Depression-era audiences, will see the noble working class getting the better of the idle rich, and sassy heiresses winning over wealthy playboys and blue-collar guys alike.

Bringing Up Baby (1938)