Tuesday
Today in my Feuding Couples Comedy course I will be looking at screwball comedies from the 1930s and 1940s. Continuing with my contention that feuding masks fears of getting hurt in relationships, I look at the anxieties underlying It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, The Lady Eve, and Adam’s Rib.
Philosopher Stanley Cavell describes these films as “comedies of remarriage,” which serves to emphasize an important dimension to several them. Awful Truth, Girl Friday, Philadelphia Story, Lady Eve, and Adam’s Rib all involve divorced or about-to-be-divorced partners falling back in love, and the thin line that must be walked is a version of one that the 17th century walked as well: institutional marriage may be suffocating but unregulated sex isn’t the answer.
It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby don’t involve remarriage but they do show the protagonists escaping the prospect of deadly marriages. All seven of the films feature non-stop battles.
John Wilmot, the notorious 17th century libertine, captures the plot line that one finds in many of these comedies. Speaking of the uncertainties of courtship and the “dull delights” of marriage, he writes,
But we, poor slaves to hope and fear,
Are never of our joys secure;
They lessen still as they draw near
And none but dull delights endure. ("The Fall")
The drama is particularly pronounced in Awful Truth. The film opens with Jerry (Cary Grant) returning home from a (hinted at) adulterous liaison. His wife, however, has also been out with her piano teacher, although she claims it was innocent. In any event, marriage seems to hold them back and, while waiting for their divorce to become final, they try out other partners.
No one measures up, however, and in the end they make their way back to each other. In a final reconciliation scene that features a door between their separate bedrooms that won’t stay closed, there’s this interchange:
Lucy: No more doubts?…No more
being…?
Jerry: Except, uh…
Lucy: Except what?
Jerry: Well, there’s only one thing that bothers me.
Lucy: What?
Jerry: [the door opens] This darn lock.
Lucy: Oh, is that all?
The door at this juncture stands in for marriage, locking them into dull delights. The film, however, momentarily finds a resolution. With their divorce scheduled to take place the next day, they bed down together exactly at midnight—which is to say, at the only possible time when they can be simultaneously married and unmarried. In this way, Awful Truth skirts Hollywood’s censorship code, which didn’t allow films to justify sex outside of marriage.
I compare this to other feuding couple comedy resolutions. In Aphra Behn’s Rover, which I discussed last week, Hellena insists on marriage because of the penalties for unmarried women. However, to make sure the marriage knot doesn’t become a “hangman’s noose” (Willmore’s phrase), she promises that their marriage will have all the unpredictability of courtship. No dull delights for them.
And then there’s His Girl Friday, in which ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) divorces editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) because she wants to settle down and “be a woman.” In the end, however, they reunite because her tempestuous (albeit frustrating) life with Burns is more exciting than any conventional marriage.
The same is true of Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and C.K. Dexter Havens (Cary Grant) in Philadelphia Story. Her other options, in this case, are a status-seeking “man of the people” and a worshipful writer (Mike Connor, played by Jimmy Stewart). Neither can live up to the liveliness of a Grant-Hepburn remarriage.
Some background on Hepburn is useful here. By the late 1930s, after her character overwhelms and humiliates a timorous Grant in Bringing Up Baby, the actress had become “box office poison.” Audiences actively loathed her, and Hepburn, figuring her screen career was over, returned to the stage.
The problem was emasculation fears. The Great Depression was already undermining men’s sense of self-respect and Hepburn didn’t make things any easier. To be sure, comedy can sometimes help audiences cope with such fears since we laugh at what makes us anxious. That’s why Howard Hawks, a man’s man if ever there was one (he hunted with Hemingway, flew planes, and drove fast cars), put strong women into his films for comic purposes. We are supposed to laugh at the scene where Hepburn forces Grant into a woman’s frilly bathrobe.
But if the anxieties are too great, comedy can’t handle them and they just make viewers painfully uncomfortable, which is what happened in 1938. Audiences preferred unthreatening females such as (to note the two leading female box office figures of the time) Shirley Temple and Judy Garland.
Fortunately for her, Hepburn had Howard Hughes in her corner, which is how she got cast in Philadelphia Story. She still had to win over audiences, however, and the film can be seen as a Hepburn reclamation project. This was accomplished through three steps: knock Hepburn down a peg, show that she can be good humored about it, and then argue that she should be regarded differently than other Hollywood actresses.
She is certainly knocked down. In the opening scene, right after she symbolically emasculates Grant by breaking one of his golf clubs over her knee, he considers punching her but then settles for shoving her in face. This male revenge fantasy reminds me of the interchange between Peter Warne (Clark Gable) and Claudette Colbert’s father near the end of It Happened One Night
Alexander Andrews: Oh, er, do you mind if I ask you a question, frankly? Do you love my daughter?
Peter Warne: Any guy that’d fall in love with your daughter ought to have his head examined.
Andrews: Now that’s an evasion!
Warne: She picked herself a perfect running mate – King Westley – the pill of the century! What she needs is a guy that’d take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not. If you had half the brains you’re supposed to have, you’d done it yourself, long ago.
Andrews: Do you love her?
Warne: A normal human being couldn’t live under the same roof with her without going nutty! She’s my idea of nothing!
Andrews: I asked you a simple question! Do you love her?
Warne: YES! But don’t hold that against me, I’m a little screwy myself!
Comedy, however, cannot countenance serious violence, at least in the 1930s. (There’s plenty of violence in the feuding couples comedies War of the Roses and the Pitt-Jolie Mr. and Mrs. Smith.) In the Depression-era version of the genre, most aggression is verbal, which gives women a more even playing field. Hepburn doesn’t always get this level field, however, since the rehabilitation project requires that she undergo some humiliation. Thus we are treated to excoriating put-downs like this one from Grant:
You could be the finest woman in the world if you could just learn to have some regard for human frailty. If only you’d slip a little sometime. But I guess that’s hopeless. Your sense of inner divinity won’t allow that.
Her father also rips her apart later in the film.
Hepburn, however, shows that she can take a verbal punch, that she’s human, and that she’s not afraid to admit when she’s wrong. As a result, she is standing tall at film’s end.
Furthermore, because of her resilience, we are told to put her in a different category. “She’s no ordinary woman,” Stewart says to Grant at one point. “She’s sort of like a queen, a radiant queen, and you can’t treat her like other women.” Audiences agreed and Hepburn made her legendary comeback, winning three more Oscars in the subsequent decades.
Feuding couples comedy in the 1930s didn’t deal only with emasculation. An electorate furious at the Great Depression and the apparent death of the American dream had embraced a kind of anarchy in the early 1930s, including heightened levels of sex (see Mae West). By 1934, however, women were more economically dependent on men and people in general wanted more stability. Furthermore, religious boycotts and censorship-happy legislators forced Hollywood to clean up its act. Sex could only be hinted at and interactions between the genders got transmuted to the verbal realm.
Note, for instance, the elaborate dance that Frank Capra does with the Hayes Code in It Happened One Night. Forced for financial reasons to share a room with Colbert, Gable sets up a bedspread between the two beds (the “walls of Jericho”) and then, to get Colbert to retreat, does a striptease—only unlike most men, he starts with his shoes, at which point she scurries behind the sheet. (On their wedding night, we hear a trumpet blast, a sign that the walls of Jericho have come tumbling down.)
Most of their erotic back and forth, however, takes the form of their squabbling. How can their close contact be interpreted as lewd when they’re arguing all the time? As is the way with this genre, their fighting conveys the intensity of their attraction.
When Hollywood abandoned its code in the 1960s, actual sex often took the place of talk. Yet the erotic charge in verbal barbs wasn’t totally abandoned, and in the Nora Ephron comedies of the 1980s and 1990s (most starring Meg Ryan), 1930s repartee made a comeback. I’ll talk about that in a future class.
