Sex and the City has nothing on screwball comedy

21 July 2007

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Sarah Churchwell says the romantic comedies of the 1930s have more glamour, wit and sexual equality than the smash-hit television series now destined for the silver screen

Screwball imagined the battle of the sexes as exquisite cosmopolitan fun, a new kind of comedy of manners, chic fairy tales in which sophisticated urban lovers crossed wits, crossed country, and, occasionally, cross-dressed. Men in tuxedos and women in satin evening gowns teased, taunted, and tormented each other into submission. Screwball was Jane Austen in Art Deco, Beatrice and Benedick at the Stork Club, with slapstick added to the mix: Cary Grant in a tuxedo slips on an olive at the Ritz in Bringing Up Baby; Myrna Loy in furs does a skidding pratfall across the glossy floor of a bar in The Thin Man. Screwball imagined women who were as smart, stylish, witty, independent and forceful as the men who tangled with them.

From the start, Sex and the City was nostalgic for a different era in Hollywood romance — the most infantile and repressive era, the late 1950s. The opening words of the first episode were: ‘Welcome to the age of un-innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead we have breakfast at

7 a.m., and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. How the hell did we get into this mess?’ By watching the wrong movies, apparently. Being nostalgic for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and An Affair to Remember means identifying with a version of prelapsarian romantic bliss in which the woman is either a prostitute in all but name or ends up in a wheelchair. It’s a revealing choice.

Screwball imagined an altogether more robust world, in which lovers didn’t need each other desperately; they were not so insufficient. Nor could man hope to conquer woman; the best he could achieve was détente. In screwball women and men gave as good they got, artists at one-upmanship and masters of the Parthian shot. Neither admitted defeat; neither was in the wrong for long. Except in the sense that love would conquer all, the game was never rigged: screwball admired both its protagonists equally, and meted out impartial justice that was very nearly irrespective of sex (bar the occasional spanking). If Clark Gable taught Claudette Colbert how to dunk doughnuts properly in one scene in It Happened One Night, she taught him how to hitchhike in the next. If Carole Lombard got punched in the jaw in Nothing Sacred, she socked Fredric March right back. The lovers in screwball were as perfectly matched as their wardrobes, as for a brief period during the Depression Hollywood stopped worrying and learnt to love the bombshell.

Take the following exchange, which opens the incomparable His Girl Friday, in which Rosalind Russell comes to see Cary Grant, her ex-husband, for the first time since their divorce. She tells him he wouldn’t know her any more, and he replies:

Walter: I’d know you any time. Any —

Hildy: ‘Any place. Anywhere.’ You’re repeating yourself, Walter. That’s the speech you made the night you proposed.

Walter: I notice you still remember it.