Sex and the City has nothing on screwball comedy

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.

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.