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Sex and the City has nothing on screwball comedy

Sarah Churchwell

Wednesday, 18th July 2007

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

You can learn a great deal about a culture from its fantasies. If Sex and the City is anything to go by, ours are pretty impoverished. The first film version of the HBO series is going into production and will be released next year, guaranteed to offer its trademark view that femininity today is defined by shoes, shopping and sex. I like all three as much as the next girl — unless the next girl is a character on Sex and the City — but my fantasies are rather more ambitious. They were formed years ago by a passionate devotion to the peerless romantic comedies of the 1930s, known as screwballs. Some 65 years before Sex and the City offered ‘groundbreaking’ stories about professional women seeking true love in the big city, screwball comedy did the same thing, except that its ideal women were usually minding their own business instead of desperately seeking a husband. Not exactly progress.

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