The 10 Best Screwball Comedies

In 1967, Pauline Kael wrote a seminal piece in The New Yorker entitled “Movies on Television,” examining what it was like to revisit films on the small screen: which ones survived the transfer largely unscathed, and which lost much of their majesty and meaning reduced to screens a fraction of their original size. (As early as the 1950’s, a smattering of TV stations had begun showing old movies during late-night hours, and by the mid-’60s, all three broadcast networks had primetime slots devoted to recent releases — but catching your favorite old film on TV remained a rarity.) Kael could hardly have imagined the technological advances to come. In 1972, the first video cassette recorder was made available to consumers; within five years, old movies were being released on VHS. And by 1980, more people were watching films on TV than in theatres.

I started this blog in 2012 with the intention to talk about my TV viewing habits — but let’s face it: they’re hardly limited to television series. Half the time, I’m exploring or revisiting old movies, and what with all the channels dedicated to vintage film — from TCM to Criterion — there aren’t enough hours in the day. And of course, if you want to delve into an actor or director’s film career, that’s how you do it: on television. (Fifty years ago, you’d wait for a revival house or college campus to stage a retrospective.)

So which feature films survive the transfer to television best? In 1967, Kael wrote that while certain movies, transplanted to the small screen, “lose much of what made them worth looking at — [those] of von Sternberg, for example, designed in light and shadow, or the subtleties of Max Ophuls, or the lyricism of Satyajit Ray,” there were whole genres that held up well: horror, for example, or fantasy — or screwball. And that’s where we come in, because if there’s any film whose appeal is fully appreciable and approachable on the small screen, it’s the screwball comedy. (If you want to check out an old movie on TV, and be sure you’re getting the best bang for your buck, watch a screwball.) That Hollywood phenomenon, which reached its zenith in the mid- to late-'30s, is remembered as a frothy blend of sophistication and slapstick, buoyed by dialogue both diabolically clever and at times seemingly effortlessly improvised.

But in truth, screwball is less a genre than a sensibility. For just under a decade, starting in 1934, romantic comedy was transformed into a tangy, slangy war of wits that lifted and liberated Depression-era audiences: reinventing courtship as a ritual that everyone could relate and aspire to. Screwballs suggested that romance — even marriage — could be fun; that one-upsmanship was a sport to be savored; and that women — the smarter sex, the ones who had learned the ropes while the men were busy playing by the rules — would invariably have the upper hand. Screwball couples — its heroines in particular — thrived on an element of risk: whether they were crashing a political function or a private fête, whether they were faking a fatal illness or a homicide. They teetered gleefully on the line between respectability and lawlessness.

A bit of screen history, for the uninitiated. When the Hays Office took over policing films in 1934 — and instructed Hollywood to adhere to a new, restrictive moral code — the tone of movie love had to change. The best pre-Code romantic comedies were full of sex and swagger (think “Red Dust,” with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, sizzling). Hollywood had just seen a huge influx of playwrights and sly wits from New York City — lured west by studio heads as talking pictures took hold — and they took the Hays Office decree as a challenge. Speaking in a vernacular that resonated with audiences, they set about to reinvent screen romance: to convey its intimacy and intoxication in new ways — ways at once subtler yet broader, wittier yet crazier. The writers’ own irreverence bled onto the screen, and the resulting scenarios fueled the imagination of Depression-era audiences; they came to feel that they, too, had the potential to be smart and special, and to find love that was not only exhilarating but challenging in all the right ways — like those glorious creatures on the screen. At their best, screwball couples were so comedically in tune that they achieved a spontaneity, an unrestraint and a zest for life that the rest of us couldn’t help but aspire to.

These days, it’s common to label every quirky romantic comedy to come out of Hollywood in the late ’30s and early ’40s a screwball. So let’s set some ground rules, shall we? Screwball doesn’t necessarily mean “fast.” It doesn’t mean “loud.” It doesn’t mean “slapstick.” It doesn’t mean “couples acting crazy.” Plenty of romantic comedies proceed at a reasonable pace, at a comfortable decibel level, and without a reliance on pratfalls — and they are most definitely screwballs. And conversely, there are lots of ’30s and ’40s films with bright, infectious lines and/or impressive physical comedy that are labeled as screwballs, but I beg to differ. I love Topper as much as the next person, but a screwball it ain’t. Neither is Mr. Deeds Goes to Town or Holiday — or 95% of the romantic comedies produced after 1942. You can’t rely on a synopsis to tell you if it’s a screwball; you can’t rely on the names of actors or directors or screenwriters. (Arise, My Love is often regarded as a wartime drama, but it’s a screwball that gets serious. Skylark, a year later — featuring the same stars — is tagged a screwball because of one slapstick scene, but it’s a domestic comedy that’s almost thematically anti-screwball.) It’s there in the way the film views its characters: their needs, their impulses, their outlook and their relationship to the world around them. And it’s there in the tone: sensible even at its most irreverent, palpably sane even at its daffiest. (And never, ever inspirational — heaven forbid.)

Below, my top 10 screwball comedies, plus a host of honorable mentions. If you’re a newcomer to the genre, I hope you’ll be intrigued; if you’re a devotee, you might be aghast. Quite a few famous titles don’t appear here: some I don’t care for at all; others, simply not enough to include among my favorites.

So let’s start with my honorable mentions, in rising order of favor:

— Three Blind Mice (1938): Had Twentieth Century-Fox not trimmed and excised scenes to fit it on a double bill with their domestic drama Woman Against Woman, this might’ve been a romantic comedy classic. As it is, it’s still a charmer. Three sisters languishing on a Kansas chicken ranch come into a small inheritance: enough to allow them a trip to a chic Santa Barbara hotel, where one sibling (Loretta Young) poses as an heiress, the other two as her secretary and maid. Their plan: to snare Young — and in time each of them — a wealthy husband. Lots of screwballs took their cue from the co-mingling of the classes; it wasn’t just an easy way to provide conflict, but to remind audiences of the universality of its themes — in particular, how both rich and poor fall prey to their passions. Three Blind Mice is a whacked-out fairy-tale about best-laid plans. Every presumption made is pointedly undermined; every pronouncement is promptly discarded. But even when Young’s schemes go awry, her midwestern pragmatism sees her through. (Deliberately ramming her sailboat into David Niven’s, so he’ll have to rescue her when they capsize, she’s dismayed to discover he can’t swim — plus he’s flailing so much, he’s dragging them both under. So she knocks him out and hauls him back to shore.) Joel McCrea is the mock millionaire Young has the misfortune to fall for, and Binnie Barnes steals the show as Niven’s pleasure-seeking sister. The premise proved so flexible that the studio reused it for the ’40s musicals Moon Over Miami and Three Little Girls in Blue, and a decade later for that paradigm of ’50s glamour, How to Marry a Millionaire. (Writer-director Preston Sturges borrowed quite a few elements from Three Blind Mice for his 1942 screwball The Palm Beach Story.)

— Bedtime Story (1941): Even though the first screwball about a squabbling theatrical couple — Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century — had bombed in 1934 (for the record, I find all of Hawks’s screwballs a little heartless), that didn’t stop studios from frequenting the footlights again and again. Here, Fredric March and Loretta Young are the toasts of Broadway: he writes the plays and she stars in them. They’ve had a string of successes, but they’ve agreed to move on, and have purchased a farm in the country where they’re planning to retire. But March can’t let go. At their farewell dinner with friends, he produces a new play he’s written — and announces he’s sold the farm to get it produced. And she decides to leave him. Bedtime Story is about March’s efforts — or shameless ploys, to be accurate — to win back his wife. But how do you reclaim a spouse who acts on impulse, whose go-to response is self-sabotage? Every time Young gets wise to one of March’s cons, she overreacts and digs herself into a deeper hole: a quickie divorce, a hasty engagement, a loveless marriage. March displays his usual comic chops, and although Young lacks the eccentricities that might explain her character’s mood swings, her natural warmth and vitality keep giving way to something menacing beneath the surface. After she storms out of one early scene — and punts a theatrical set model into the air as she goes — you realize there’s no limit to the emotional and physical wreckage these two will giddily leave in their wake. And you can’t wait to survey the debris. (As an in-joke, the play March has written happens to be the script to one of Columbia’s biggest screwball hits, Theodora Goes Wild. See below.)

— What a Woman! (1943): The war years were not kind to the screwball heroines. Their delicious self-absorption was anathema to studio heads insistent on “serious” films, and their independence — at a time when women were entering the workforce in record numbers — was deemed threatening. So what were all these actresses to do? Well, they were put into “boss lady” films: their characters scaling professional heights, but realizing that their achievement counted for nothing — because what they needed was a man. These films swept Hollywood like a plague. Rosalind Russell did no less than eight between 1940 and 1950: from judge to psychiatrist to college dean — all frigid creatures waiting to be thawed. But What a Woman! broke the mold and re-entered the screwball domain — in hindsight, without intending to. Reimagining Russell as a talent agent — with an understanding of the excesses common to the profession — it lets her play an actual role instead of a type, and she digs in with renewed resourcefulness. (She has a great bit where she’s so flustered, she answers the phone before picking up the receiver.) Oh, there’s the requisite speech where her co-star (here, as often, Brian Ahearn) insists that the best parts of her lie buried. But that’s not the story that’s told. The story that’s told is how Russell is such a persuasive agent that she creates a monster she can’t control, arming him with her own starry-eyed steeliness, and it takes some fast thinking — plus the wiles of the man she anoints her partner-in-crime — to keep her from being eaten alive. What a Woman!, written to put a boss lady in her place, reminds us instead that there’s nothing more infectious than an independent female.

— Fifth Avenue Girl (1939): The ubiquitous and invaluable character actor Walter Connolly, who appears in four of my top screwballs, is fed up with his business and, in particular, his family: the wife who parades her affairs to the delight of the gossip columns; the son who spends his days on the polo fields instead of at the office; the daughter who parties till dawn with her socialite friends, then haunts the kitchen to pine over the chauffeur. Seeking solace on a park bench, he happens upon Ginger Rogers, who has no affection for those she labels “rich cadavers.” (At the moment, Connolly feels the same way.) She doesn’t have affection for anything. Rogers’ onscreen persona is oddly muted by director Gregory La Cava, who seizes on her deadpan inflections but little else — but she serves her purpose, as Connolly brings her into the house as a chaos agent posing as a gold digger. Stoking his family’s fears about his infidelity, fiscal irresponsibility and impending senility, he whips them into shape. La Cava could be a genius helmer (The Half-Naked Truth, Stage Door, Unfinished Business), and Fifth Avenue Girl isn’t among his smoothest efforts — but it’s satisfying all the same, buoyed by the efforts of its cast. Of all the dithering, dallying high-society matrons who graced the screwball stage, from Alice Brady to Billie Burke to Mary Nash, Verree Teasdale — a decade or two younger than her screen counterparts — was one of the best. (James Ellison, the chauffeur, was a leading-man type with a flair for comedy who was wasted in Hollywood, left shuttling between B movies and westerns. The year before Fifth Avenue Girl, he had played opposite a young Lucille Ball in the slight but affable romantic comedy Next Time I Marry, and in a saner universe, both of them would have been groomed for screwball stardom.)

— Four’s a Crowd (1938): Warner Bros. decided to rip off MGM’s 1936 hit Libeled Lady — which had embroiled four of the studio’s biggest stars in a tale of a newspaper editor and a spoiled heiress — and did so blatantly, right down to the opening credits, with the four leads (here, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Patric Knowles and Rosalind Russell) strolling arm in arm towards the camera. But whereas MGM’s Jack Conway was a competent contract director at best — resulting in a film that’s commendable but rarely intoxicating — Curtiz had a gift for fluid camera movement and composition. Four’s a Crowd is the “exception that proves the rule” screwball, the one that — on the face of it — makes all the usual mistakes: sacrificing clarity for speed, piling on too many improbable plot twists and moving pieces. But Curtiz and writer Casey Robinson get away with it by linking the excesses to the character they create for Flynn: public relations giant Robert Lansford, who feeds on frenzy. The narrative — which barrels along like the model train race that’s the film’s centerpiece — doubles down on the shifting alliances and entanglements emblematic of screwball, but makes them a by-product of Lansford’s strategy of ruling through chaos and misdirection. (And the more chaos rules, the more enlivened Flynn becomes.) There are dizzying tracking shots and whip pans that seem tied to Lansford’s gleeful sense of mayhem and to the havoc he leaves in his wake. Throughout, the principals switch partners so casually and frequently, you have no idea who’ll end up with whom. But Robinson and Curtiz drop just enough clues — and Flynn so carefully modulates his behavior with each of the women — that the last-minute pairings seem not only satisfactory, but sensible.

— Personal Property (1937): Jean Harlow is an American widow in London, awash in unpaid bills. Robert Taylor is the black sheep of his family, recently released from prison. They meet, and when his flirting proves ineffective, he finds a way into her heart and her home — by convincing the bailiff who’s serving a writ on her to appoint him a sheriff’s officer. Personal Property is the screwball that shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does. Taylor had largely made a name for himself in dramatic roles. (He’d just finished romancing Garbo in Camille.) Harlow was ill during filming and succumbed to kidney disease a few months after the film’s release. But what Taylor lacks in comic chops he makes up for with a smitten sincerity that’s endearing and amusing — and if a bit of Harlow’s customary bravado is missing, it works to the film’s advantage: tempering her character’s gumption with a touching vulnerability. MGM adapted this one from their 1931 film The Man in Possession, and with the original’s raciness and roguery largely abandoned out of necessity, the film is sometimes seen as an example of how the Hays Office destroyed screen comedy. But the tone isn’t bowdlerized; it’s transformed — into one of the swooniest of screwballs. Taylor’s Raymond Dabney is overhauled from a charming reprobate into a charmer; Harlow’s reimagined Crystal Wetherby has that sort of wide-eyed weariness that was the actress’s specialty. (By the midway point, he’s so love-struck that he offers to buttle at her upcoming dinner party, and Harlow indulges in her gift for playacting as she helps him get into character.) They’re schemers and daydreamers, these two: good people who’ve suffered bad breaks. He’s lost purpose, she’s grown trapped — but they reacquaint each other with the promise of possibilities.

— The Moon’s Our Home (1936): Margaret Sullavan is tempestuous Hollywood star Cherry Chester (née Sarah Brown), given to fits of rage and flights of fancy. (At times you can feel her riffing on Carole Lombard in Twentieth Century, and there are shades of Hepburn and Harlow in there, too; Sullavan leaves no star unburned.) Henry Fonda — her ex-husband in real life — plays arrogant “boy adventurer” Anthony Amberton, who’s given to penning novels about his expeditions and who — besieged by female fans eager to paw and pursue him — retreats into the nom de plume “John Smith.” The movie’s conceit is that Cherry Chester and Anthony Amberton hate each other sight unseen, but Sarah Brown and John Smith manage to fall in love without being aware of each other’s public personae. The original treatment of Faith Baldwin’s novel was by the husband-and-wife team of Isabel Dawn and Boyce DeGaw, but at Sullavan’s request, Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell were brought in to do the rewrite, and few screwballs ever got off to a better start. Sullavan and Fonda have the kind of easy rapport — both while courting and while clashing — that you can only imagine comes from having lived through their own (by all accounts) tumultuous relationship. The Moon’s Our Home has the kind of supporting cast that ’30s film aficionados dream of: Beulah Bondi, Charles Butterworth, Margaret Hamilton, Walter Brennan and a host of other familiar players. Even the tiniest bit parts are infused with attitude. The last 20 minutes, sadly, are sort of a mad rush to the finish line; it’s unfortunate, but not damaging. You’re left with far too many wonderful memories, and the sense of Smith and Jones as comic soulmates.

— To Be or Not to Be (1942): Although director Ernst Lubitsch, during the late ’30s and early ’40s, turned out a few much-loved romantic comedies with screwball elements (Ninotchka, The Shop Around the Corner), his attempts to embrace the screwball style — in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and That Uncertain Feeling — were woeful. But in 1942, he directed this marvelous romp (script by Edwin Justus Meyer, from a story by Melchior Lengyel), in which Jack Benny and Carole Lombard, as a husband-and-wife acting team in Warsaw, join the resistance and put their thespian talents to good use. To Be or Not to Be is one of several fine screwballs set against a backdrop of war: a reminder of how malleable the genre was, and of how much longer it could’ve endured had Hollywood attitudes — towards women, in particular — not changed so dramatically in the early ’40s. (No, the wartime setting doesn’t keep it from being a screwball; screwball couples can thrive in any terrain.) Here the familiar spousal battle of wits — established early on, as Lombard arranges for a series of dressing-room trysts while Benny is onstage tackling Hamlet’s soliloquy — proves essential to the way we interpret the ensuing events, because as the deceptions grow dicier and the stakes ever higher (Hitler himself even shows up several times — or does he?), you never once doubt that the protagonists will triumph. Screwball couples don’t just succeed, they triumph. Lombard’s last performance, and one of her best.

— It Happened One Night (1934), the blockbuster that ignited the screwball craze. It took home Oscars for Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, so never let anyone claim that screwball was only a “popular success.” Claudette Colbert is socialite Ellie Andrews — spirited away by her father following her elopement to a man he deems unsuitable — who escapes captivity and boards the night bus from Miami to New York City. Clark Gable is reporter Peter Warne, who has the good fortune to be on that bus and proposes a deal he makes sound mutually beneficial: he won’t expose her, if she grants him an exclusive story. He’s a know-it-all with a self-confidence that can be seductive. She’s a sheltered heiress with no real-life experience, but she’s shrewd and eminently adaptable. And the first time they’re forced to think on their feet — when detectives come calling, and they revel in an orgy of improvisation — you realize they’re kindred spirits: both of them a little too smart for their own good, both a product and a casualty of a world to which they’ve never quite felt they belonged. And they soon realize it, too. It Happened One Night is both a prototype and a classic, marred only by a languid third act; Frank Capra claimed he got so bored with the film that he never finished the final edit, and it shows. But its love story is so fresh and beguiling — and enduring — that its failings all but fade away. (Columbia’s self-proclaimed follow-up to It Happened One Night — If You Could Only Cook, with Herbert Marshall and Jean Arthur — is also worth a watch. Marshall and an unbilled Romaine Callender engage in a butler-and-employer skit that’s pure delight.)

And my final five honorable mentions, all of which inched their way into my Top 10 (and back again) as I was writing:

— Say It in French (1938): It culminates in a high-speed chase in a motorized soapbox cart, but the whole film zooms along so speedily, it clocks in at just 70 minutes — seesawing merrily between chaos and common sense. When pro golfer Ray Milland, fresh off a European tour, brings home a French bride (Olympe Bradna), his plans to introduce her to his family are forestalled by their impending financial ruin; while they implore him to marry his rich ex-girlfriend, Bradna finds herself mistaken for the new maid. The bare bones of the plot (adapted from Jacques Deval’s play Soubrette) sound tedious, but director Andrew L. Stone’s execution is not. His anarchic spirit occasionally calls to mind Paramount Pre-Code classics like Million Dollar Legs and Monkey Business; good lines and clever bits fly by so fast that you’re still catching them the second and third times through. The extensive location shooting means that every scene feels populated, whether Milland is in Central Park fending off his faux fiancée’s advances, or at the Rainbow Room watching her down a platter of shot drinks in response to news of his marriage. No one is allowed to scheme or shame themselves without hordes of onlookers; the screen is filled with bit players whose faces and reactions register. The film is unusually explicit (Milland sleeps with his new bride in her quarters, in a single bed), and the lovers are uncommonly practical, coming clean about their secret marriage whenever they feel it would be absurd to continue the charade. But their candor only contributes to the confusion. Milland — in only his second top-billed role — earns his star status; his energy seems boundless, his commitment unquestioning. (He’s a particular marvel making a lengthy exit from a restaurant with an unconscious lady slung over his shoulder.)

— Too Many Husbands (1940): Tennyson’s narrative poem Enoch Arden — about a missing man declared legally dead, who returns to find his wife married to another — has been the source of countless film adaptations. One of the best remembered is the gender-reversed screwball My Favorite Wife, but far better is Too Many Husbands, which premiered a few months earlier. In My Favorite Wife, the new spouse is made so awful, there’s really no conflict, just time-killing; Too Many Husbands’ inspired solution is to make both husbands — Fred MacMurray and Melvyn Douglas — so appealing that wife Jean Arthur finds it impossible to choose. And the resulting stakes are raised considerably — and here’s where the movie soars into screwball territory — by the fact that she doesn’t want to choose. She was neglected by both husbands, but suddenly both are vying for her attention and promising unwavering devotion. It’s the pleasure Jean Arthur takes in her newfound ménage à trois that propels the movie — not to mention the rivalry between MacMurray and Douglas, both of whom have proven satisfying leading men. So the audience is as torn as she is. The film’s final sequence — in which a judge decides whom Arthur is legally married to, then she retires to a nightclub with both suitors, to make it clear that, as far as she’s concerned, the courts have no business meddling in a woman’s private affairs — is one of the most exhilarating in all of screwball. You can feel the creative team’s joy at putting one over on the Hays Office — and thumbing their nose at the League of Decency.

— The Awful Truth (1937): A husband projects his infidelity onto his wife, and the ensuing issues of trust prompt them to split up. The Awful Truth relies on the potent charms of its stars, Cary Grant (one of his greatest performances, in a role he initially wanted out of) and Irene Dunne (striking, but at times a bit too comedically self-aware), and the improvisatory gifts of its director Leo McCarey, who took home an Oscar. McCarey’s unconventional shooting style (dialogue was often ad-libbed on the set, or handed to the actors just prior to filming) means that when scenes are clicking — as they are in pretty much the entire second half — the film enjoys both an elasticity and a eye for detail that are singular in the screwball canon. When the pieces aren’t quite there, as in the opening scenes, the film feels static and stagy — like the cast is waiting around for someone to hand them a decent line. But McCarey‘s methods are inseparable from the themes he’s exploring. Barring the actors from a finished script allows him to show his protagonists at their most vulnerable and exposed, then bask in their mortification. He creates a comedy of discomfort. And the added genius of the film is that the viewer is unaware of how much Grant and Dunne’s characters belong together until they initiate divorce proceedings. It’s the lengths they go to to sabotage anything that threatens their potential reconciliation that turns these idle rich bon vivants into a genuine screwball couple.

— It’s a Wonderful World (1939): The Thin Man had revolutionized the murder mystery by inserting a crime-solving screwball couple into the heart of it. It spawned countless sequels and imitators. Here, writer Ben Hecht — with an assist from Herman Mankiewicz — decides to tackle a genuine screwball murder mystery, both honoring and sending up the conventions of romantic comedy and detective fiction. A rush to judgment finds private dick Jimmy Stewart on the run from authorities, and the vagaries of fate pair him with poet Claudette Colbert — and so the two of them become fugitives and co-conspirators. It’s seemingly the slightest of screwballs, in which Stewart and Colbert sift through all the hints and evasions — both of the investigative and the intimate variety — at a speed that seems fast even for director W.S. Van Dyke (“One Take Woody,” as he was known in the business). As a result, despite the profusion of incident, you don't retain much — but that just fuels your desire to see it again. The one thing you gain with each viewing is a greater appreciation for just how good Stewart and Colbert are, both playing roles that run counter to type. For Stewart, who often wore his heart on his sleeve, hard-boiled detective Guy Johnson feels like a stunt he has to keep reaching for to maintain — but Stewart’s onscreen effort is indistinguishable from his character’s desperate efforts to prove his innocence. And for Colbert, whose onscreen intelligence infused all of her roles, the flustered Edwina Corday is a different kind of stretch — yet for all the ways in which Edwina finds herself out of her element, she reaches astute deductions that Guy himself misses; the unfamiliarity of her situation fuels her skepticism, and her enthusiasm ignites her intuition. She’s a poet with the heart of an adventuress.

— The Lady Eve (1941): Barbara Stanwyck is Jean Harrington, a card shark who stalks her prey on ocean liners. This time, she’s set her sights on an easy mark: explorer Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), who’s been away from civilization for so long that just the scent of a woman’s perfume makes him swoon. What Jean can’t foresee is that she’s going to fall for Charles’s palpable blend of guilelessness and foolishness. But when he’s clued in to her identity, he rejects her — in a callous and hurtful manner. That’s the first 30 minutes of The Lady Eve, and although it seduces the viewer as neatly as Jean seduces Charles, it’s merely the prologue; as they disembark the ship, Jean informs her fellow grifter, “I need him like the ax needs a turkey.” And so, Jean puts in motion the unlikeliest of revenge plots: a con so brazen that it paradoxically stops seeming like a con. The Lady Eve is about Jean getting her vengeance — and ultimately, discovering that getting what she wanted isn’t what she wants at all. But in the process, Jean and Charles find their way back to each other — in fact, they find their way to their true selves. If one of the key themes in screwball is liberation, then Preston Sturges’s film is practically a primer on the subject. It takes as uncommon a route to “happily ever after“ as any screwball I can think of; it’s a romantic comedy about two people who treat each other so brutally, they end up bringing out the best in each other. (Fonda falls prey to another con woman the following year in Rings on Her Fingers: paler than Eve, but as directed by the estimable Rouben Mamoulian, worth a look.)

And now my top 10 screwball comedies:

10. Lucky Partners (1940, RKO): Ronald Colman, passing Ginger Rogers on a crowded sidewalk near Washington Square Park, stops to offer her a casual greeting: “Good luck.” She scurries along, then turns back, uncertain she heard this man properly. She did — but why that particular pleasantry, she wonders? No reason, he admits. Touched but curious, and altogether practical, she inquires, “Do you think I need it?” — and the most courteous of gentlemen, he assures her, “Oh no, not at all.” And as they proceed down the street in opposite directions, each glancing back at the other, you can see the mutual fascination. Rogers’ Jean Newton, we can sense, hasn’t had a lot of luck in her life. Oh, she’s got a nice enough job working at her Aunt Lucy’s bookstore (Spring Byington, at her most delightfully dithering), and a decent enough fiancé (Jack Carson) who wants to marry her and move her up to Poughkeepsie — but somewhere along the way, her dreams have gotten small. But when this chance greeting from a stranger (“good luck”) is in fact followed by a fluke of fortune, she regains that ability to dream — and to dream big — and pins her hopes on her new lucky charm. Will he go half and half with her on a sweepstakes ticket? Rogers doesn’t have much to look forward to, she confesses without meaning to; Carson is so anxious to start their new life that they probably won’t have time for a honeymoon. So Colman offers a solution; he’ll gladly go in with her on the sweepstakes ticket — but if they win, then before she gets married, he gets to take her on that honeymoon she’s stopped hoping for. Platonically, of course. For Colman, who’s been leading a sheltered life, Rogers’ smile and stride makes him feel alive again. (Rogers’ effect on him was a premise that didn’t need explaining in 1940. It was shared by audiences.) Rogers, of course, is offended by the suggestion — and the more no one else is offended on her behalf (even her fiancé, who knows the odds of winning are a million to one, doesn’t see the point of getting riled up), the more outraged she becomes. But although she won’t allow herself to admit it, she doesn’t want the offer withdrawn either; it’s too flattering and titillating — not to mention evocative of the sort of spontaneity and excitement she’s been missing. (As an actress, Rogers long ago mastered the art of letting you see all the cracks in her armor.) Rogers and Colman don’t win the sweepstakes, needless to say, but they do secure a dispensation large enough for him to purchase a car and drive her up to Niagara Falls, the start of what he hopes will be “an experiment” — and a wonderful one at that. The ultimate destination — the two of them falling in love — is no surprise, but the journey is. It plays to the sort of push-and-tug of romance that Rogers had honed to an art form during her films with Fred Astaire. Rogers is suspicious Colman is going to try something, then when he doesn’t, she’s not merely humbled, but disheartened. The more she comes to realize that his intentions are honorable, the more intrigued she becomes — and the more sneakily seductive. Flirtations over the phone — done in split screen — lead them to a dance floor, then to a wishing well, then to their first kiss. The film moves smoothly and steadily — crafting the sweetest of love affairs — until the whole thing bursts open in the final 30 minutes, in a courtroom sequence that takes the movie to a whole new level. Henry Davenport, in one of the great screwball performances, is the judge, his hair as untamed as his manner: at once bemused and incensed — and thoroughly seduced by Rogers’ appeal. As witnesses step forward to offer their accounts of key events, you realize you’ve been so beguiled by the two stars that you’ve lost track of the improbability of the plot — and not just how unlikely it sounds, but how unsavory. (Best of the witnesses is a chambermaid who had a few unsettling encounters with Rogers; her memorable evidence forever validates comedy’s Rule of Three.) Lots of screwballs end up in the courtroom, but Lucky Partners has the rare legal sequence that goes exactly where you hope it will go — and it keeps going and going, like a deranged Energizer Bunny, with Rogers and Colman declaring their love for each other via a series of cross examinations. Lucky Partners — directed by Oscar winner Lewis Milestone and adapted from the French film Bonne Chance by Allan Scott (who’d done the best Astaire-Rogers films) and future famed playwright John Van Druten — was rapturously received, and a sizable hit, but it’s faded into obscurity. But it’s one of the most seductive of screwballs: it works over the viewer just like Colman works over Rogers. It uses its leads’ charm and sincerity to disarm you, to keep you from tracking all the absurdities of the plot — until they’re laid bare: unveiled in the courtroom as evidence. And then you find yourself seduced all the more.

9. Petticoat Fever (1936, MGM): Robert Montgomery was a natural imp; it’s odd that MGM — where he was under contract through the ’30s and ’40s — rarely cast him in screwballs. The studio preferred to reuse William Powell, or default to Melvyn Douglas. There was a twinkle in Montgomery’s eye; he was at his best hatching a plan or holding a secret no one else was privy to. Petticoat Fever — adapted from the 1935 play by Mark Reed — boasts one of Montgomery’s best comic performances; it’s a situation that’s tailor-made for him. He’s a wireless operator who’s been manning an isolated post in Labrador, Canada, for five years. He’s grown bored and irritable and slovenly, and he’s desperate for companionship — especially of the female variety. As he puts it, it’s been two months since he saw a woman, two years since he saw a pretty one. And then one of the prettiest shows up, Myrna Loy, accompanied by her stuffy fiancé Reginald Owen. (They were flying to a banquet in Montreal when their private plane crashed nearby.) And Montgomery — who falls for Loy, and falls hard — does everything he can to delay her departure, short of holding her hostage. He dotes on her, he flirts with her, he finds means of getting her alone. He’s not even subtle about it; when you’ve been on your own for five years, what’s the point of moving slowly? But his behavior — at least to us — doesn’t come off as arrogant or off-putting; his eyes are too aglow with the mad joy of feeling alive again. And Loy, guarded at first, quickly lets on that her reserve is a ruse: she’s secretly enchanted by the attention from this handsome stranger — even when he hijacks her on a dog sled. She’s delighted to have a fresh admirer; she’s wise to all his tricks, but she quite enjoys the show he’s putting on. And what a show! Despite his limited resources, Montgomery stages a intimate dinner party in his hut and dons a tux for the occasion; Loy, his captive audience, obliges with her best gown — leaving Owen, still wearing the drab winter suit he arrived in, feeling like a third wheel. (The entertainment is provided by two local Eskimo girls, who whip up a dance that’s half hula and half burlesque.) There’s obvious rapport between Loy and Montgomery, and there’s a joke at the heart of the story that’s irresistible: that Montgomery, who’s had to distract himself and prop up his spirits for five years, is so giddy at the prospect of new arrivals that he appears a bit crazy to Owen — but by the time he’s making a play for Owen’s fiancée, and she seems to be offering no objection, it’s Owen himself who starts to go a little mad. Petticoat Fever has got the sort of symmetry evocative of its stage origins, and in general, plays didn’t adapt well to the screwball format. Even the most frenzied were a bit too well ordered, and didn’t lend themselves to the kind of giddy improvisation on which screwball thrived. But Petticoat Fever does. It’s got the spirited exchanges and mistaken motives and unexpected arrivals that we associate with screwball — but more important, at its heart are two people who are feeling trapped, and whose meeting liberates and unleashes them. And by the time Montgomery and Loy are making up limericks to celebrate that liberation, you’ve got one of the purest of screwball romances. (When Montgomery’s fiancée shows up at the wireless station after a two-year absence — during which time he’s practically forgotten about her and their engagement — he and Loy so melt down in total tandem that you realize more than ever that they belong together.) Petticoat Fever — a big hit in 1936 — strips the screwball comedy down to its bare essentials: a couple of charismatic leads with chemistry, and a few unwanted fiancés. (The Awful Truth would adopt the same formula the following year.) Add in bright lines and a director with a flair for comedy (George Fitzmaurice, who got his start early in the silent era), and you’ve got yourself a forgotten classic.

8. Nothing Sacred (1937, Selznick International, distributed by United Artists): Welcome to New York City, where people enjoy nothing more than applauding their own philanthropy. Ben Hecht, journalist and foreign correspondent turned playwright and screenwriter, loved to thumb his nose at the newspaper racket; here he shows the same disdain for the readers. Reporter Wallace Shawn (Fredric March) spots a piece in the back pages of his Morning Star about one Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard), a young woman in Warsaw, Vermont, who — like many female factory workers over the previous two decades — has been stricken with terminal radium poisoning. Seeking to salvage his career after failing to properly vet a source, Wally determines to bring Hazel to New York City and spotlight her courage in a series of articles that are certain to goose circulation. Except he arrives in Warsaw at the exact moment she finds that she’s been misdiagnosed; she doesn’t have radium poisoning at all. For Hazel, who lives in a wretched town where — as Wally soon discovers — the adults are unfriendly and the toddlers downright dangerous, the $200 her fellow factory workers have raised to send her on a trip to New York was the last hurrah she’d been praying for. Finding out she’s now stranded in this awful town is like a death sentence of its own — or as Hazel puts it, “It’s just a little startling to be brought to life twice, and both times in Warsaw.” So when Wally proposes the very trip to the Big Apple she’s been dreaming about, she’s not about to say no — or to reveal the truth about her condition. The premise of Nothing Sacred is pretty much the whole show; it simply falls to Hecht (and the team of writers who took over after his battles with producer David O. Selznick prompted him to quit, including George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, Ring Lardner Jr. and Dorothy Parker) to run variations on the theme, as the Big Apple lavishes Hazel with crocodile tears. Lombard has such an uncommon blend of frailty and vitality in this role that you forgive her her deception — especially when the folks who are celebrating and prematurely mourning her are so smitten with their self-perceived sincerity. And eventually the con starts to eat at her, and try as she might, she can’t drink it away. (The doctor who’s accompanied her to New York — it’s the wonderful Charles Winninger — has no trouble remaining inebriated for the entire movie, to bury his shame.) And it further ignites her guilt when Wally — who’s come to regret exploiting Hazel’s illness for a by-line — starts to care for her; he falls for the fearlessness and nobility that she knows are all an act. And she falls for him, too, for believing so fervently in the woman she’s not. Nothing Sacred is a love story between two hustlers who come to regret the choices they’ve made, and see each other as their only salvation. They may only be marginally better than the hypocrites who surround them — but it’s that slightest of superiority that elevates them, that makes their love story worth rooting for — and that makes them among the most memorable of screwball couples. (Lombard’s performance here is among her best, and it follows two that I don’t care for at all: in Swing High, Swing Low and My Man Godfrey. Of all the great screwball leading ladies, Lombard soared the highest, but also stumbled the most.) And director William Wellman proves precisely the sturdy hand needed at the helm. The mistake that screwballs too often made (especially the ones with newsroom settings) was to keep the pacing so frantic that the love story — the thing the audience was there for — didn’t get its due. (The insistent Love Is News, also a 1937 release — with socialite Loretta Young exacting vengeance on reporter Tyrone Power — is a prime offender.) Wellman sees to it that the love story is never subordinated to the newsroom frenzy. In fact, he maintains a sunnier tone than Hecht, one that proves crucial to the film’s success. In the scene where Wally escorts Hazel to the Big Apple, they peer out the window of their private plane, and as the city appears before them in glorious Technicolor, Wellman evokes the thrill we all feel that first time in the big city. The friction between Wellman’s idealized view of New York and Hecht’s cynical view is part of what makes the film so fascinating. Hazel and Wally may be scammers and schemers with an elusive sense of morality — but they’re also the best that humanity has to offer.

7. The Good Fairy (1935, Universal): As screwball swept Hollywood, the studios expected their female talent to fall in line, and there’s hardly a leading lady who escaped the craze, no matter how unlikely the casting seemed on paper. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford did it (The Bride Came C.O.D. and They All Kiss the Bride, respectively), as did dramatic divas Janet Gaynor (Three Loves Has Nancy) and Merle Oberon (That Uncertain Feeling). Even Garbo had a go at it (Two-Faced Woman) — and it ended her career. But of all the unlikely candidates, it was Sullavan — who, up to that point, had only suffered in period dramas — who had not only the talent, but the temperament. Preston Sturges took the Ferenc Molnar play of the same name, which had been presented on Broadway in an English translation during the 1931-32 season (lasting a whopping 13 performances), kept the bare bones of the plot, then rebuilt it from the ground up. Specifically, he rebuilt it to suit the talents of Sullavan, who had bewitched him in her previous film Little Man, What Now? As Sturges reimagines it, Sullavan’s onscreen persona re-emerges as a comic force: eager, impressionable, ruffled, frazzled — and too well-meaning to avoid getting into trouble. It’s 1930’s Budapest, and Sullavan — an orphan and usherette — has landed an invitation to a posh party, where she’s hit on by libidinous industrialist Frank Morgan (forever tongue tied, in the Morgan tradition). Engaging in a ploy that’s worked for her in the past, she insists she’s married, and when Morgan suggests a solution — that he could create a well-paying position for her husband, who could then lavish her with the luxuries Morgan feels she deserves — Sullavan sees a chance to do some good. Fancying herself a “good fairy,” she chooses a name out of the phonebook and claims he’s her husband, confident that her quick thinking will change a poor man’s life. And indeed it does, but not as smoothly as she’d hoped. The dialogue is delightful, the energy nonstop, and the misunderstandings and miscommunications flow lavishly from Sturges’s pen. As the recipient of the windfall, Herbert Marshall — as a stuffy lawyer with an unsightly beard, which he delights in combing for anyone who’ll watch — proves just as unexpectedly charming a screwball hero as he proved later that year opposite Jean Arthur in If You Could Only Cook. From their first encounter, you recognize the chemistry that Marshall and Sullavan share, but it’s on the shopping spree that follows (facilitated by Morgan’s money) that you sense their comic kinship. He purchases the automobile that he craves (but in the color she prefers), she needles him into shaving his beard — then persuades him to buy her the “genuine foxine fur” that’s captured her fancy. (It’s rather an atrocity, but being raised by nuns has clearly given her an idiosyncratic sense of fashion.) He postures that he’s in control, but he’s lived in isolation for so long, he mostly wants to make her happy; she’s content to let him think he’s in control as long as she gets what she wants — which in this case is a foxine fur. Director William Wyler maintains his customary tight grip, even as the farce spirals deliriously out of control. Sullavan was uncharacteristically rattled during the first few days of filming; Wyler took her out to dinner to calm her nerves and win her trust, and was so successful that they were married shortly thereafter. Hampered only by the final tableau — a wedding ceremony — that brings the proceedings to a fitting close, when what you crave is for Sturges’s fairy to pull off one last feat of magic.

6. Easy Living (1937, Paramount): Preston Sturges wrote a very verbal comedy (didn’t he always?), and director Mitchell Leisen — suspecting that all that talk was going to grow a little tedious — tempered it with a sumptuous production design (by his favorite Art Director Ernst Fegté) and peppered it with pratfalls. The tug-of-war between writer and director doesn’t hobble the film; it energizes it. There’s wonderful slapstick down flights of stairs, and a slip-and-slide in a giant lily-shaped bathtub, and nothing more ambitious or more compulsively watchable than a free-for-all at an automat, where the inadvertent lowering of a lever delivers mountains of food to the hungry masses. Easy Living is the film with the classic opening in which Edward Arnold — as JB Ball a/k/a The Bull of Broad Street, the third biggest banker in the world — is on his penthouse rooftop fighting with his wife about her latest extravagance, a sable coat she doesn’t need but wants. In the sort of dramatic gesture common to the wealthy in ’30s comedies, he grabs it and tosses it off the roof; it floats through the air like a kite catching the breeze and lands atop Jean Arthur’s Mary Smith, who’s riding the second story of a double-decker bus. Mary is a bit flustered by the fur coat that’s been handed to her — and literally handed to her: Ball insists she keeps it (“Merry Christmas!”) — but she’s more concerned that her hat’s been ruined. (Mary is nothing if not practical, and she can hardly show up at The Boys’ Constant Companion — a reputable magazine — with a smashed hat.) Ball purchases her a new one before dropping her off at work, but her job swiftly evaporates when her boss — seeing her sail into the office in the sable coat to which she’s hardly given a second thought — presumes the worst of her. Everyone in New York presumes the worst. Rumors fly from the hat shop proprietor (Franklin Pangborn, at his most unctuous) to his comrade in confidences, chef turned hotel owner Louis Louis (Spanish character actor Louis Alberni, at his most boisterous), who engage in a kind of flamboyantly coded shorthand: “The Bull of Broad Street. With a girl — in the sablest sable coat that ever sabled.” “Well, wherever there's smoke, there must be somebody smoking.” Ball, as it turns out, holds the mortgage — three of them, in fact — on Louis’ failing property and is threatening foreclosure: what better way to ensure the hotel stays open than to set up Ball’s latest ladylove in the Imperial Suite? And in no time flat, penniless Mary Smith has been whisked from her tiny flat on 114th St. to a high-grade high-rise Shangri-La. (Mary, completely unaware of why she’s being treated to such luxury accommodations, but steadfastly sensible, negotiates the same fee she was paying at her former home: seven dollars a week, plus breakfast.) Easy Living manages to be both a savage sendup of corporate America and the sweetest of fairytales. While everyone else is jockeying for wealth or power or favor — as the mistaken identities and misunderstandings pile up like the proverbial traffic accident you can’t look away from — Mary and the nice chap she met at the automat (it’s Ray Milland as Ball’s son John, who’s determined to earn a living away from demands of his domineering father) make the most of this pleasure palace she’s been gifted. They both wander into Wonderland with their eyes wide open, but unquestioningly. They don’t pretend to know all the answers, but they don’t feel a need to demand them either; they merely make the best of a good situation. (That the two of them spending the weekend together in a hotel suite made it past the Hays Office is a bit of a miracle, but it’s delicately done. As they laze before bedtime in a double chaise lounge, their heads meeting in the middle, John leans over to kiss her. Her delayed yet delighted response — “Hey!” — makes their charged encounter seem almost chaste. Almost.) The two of them share less screen time than most screwball couples, but by the end, you truly feel that Mary and John are kindred spirits, somehow part of — yet separate from — the lunacy that surrounds them. And it’s that aspect of Easy Living — of the couple belonging, yet not belonging — that elevates it to the top tier of screwballs.

5. True Confession (1937, Paramount): Carole Lombard’s Helen Bartlett is an inveterate liar — or at least, that’s how it appears to everyone else. As Helen sees it, her tall tales are simply a method of problem-solving — and married to an incorrigibly honest lawyer (who will only take cases if the client is innocent), she’s got a mountain of problems, starting with putting food on the table. So if a man shows up to repossess her typewriter (she writes fiction in her spare time — or at least tries to — which only fuels her fantasies), why shouldn’t she make up a story about how she and her husband Ken lost a baby — and he’s grown so unhinged that he sees the typewriter as their child and comes out every night to caress it — and he’s sworn that if anyone ever tried to take it away, he’d kill them? I mean, it scares off the repo man (especially when Ken fortuitously walks in the door with a generic “how’s my baby?”), and isn’t that all that matters? Lombard is a ball of fire in this movie, which was shot in record time by Wesley Ruggles (who began his professional career as a Keystone Cop and knew a thing or two about pacing). She shows you the speed at which Helen’s mind works, and all the gears switching along the way. She even gives Helen a “tell” every time she’s about to spin one of her yarns: her tongue starts to push against her right cheek, grinding away like the grinding of her creative gears. Helen’s disregard for truth has put a strain on her marriage, but what puts a greater strain is when she’s accused of a murder she didn’t commit and decides to plead self-defense — so her husband can take the case and garner the attention he deserves. For Helen, everything she does is to aid her husband; it’s a dubious justification at best, but Lombard attacks the role with such single-minded ferocity — and MacMurray clings so vociferously to outdated notions of honor and integrity — that you never once question her tactics. You’re far too engaged and amused by them. And when the pair of them are in the courtroom, not merely mounting her defense — but reenacting the crime, complete with rickety pop-up sets — you realize that he shares her flair for the theatrical; he just applies it differently. They belong together, these two. They complement and complete each other: him with his passion for truth, her with her gift for fiction. Una Merkel is a fabulous disbelieving best friend, forever at a loss to keep up with Lombard’s lies. (“Do you remember what Ken said last night?” Lombard nudges her, looking for backup for one of her fibs, but a flummoxed Merkel can’t see past the lack of logic: “You mean, when the three of us had gone to bed?”) And John Barrymore is marvelous fun as a drunk who considers himself a crime solver extraordinaire (and is given to gleeful pronouncements, even before the evidence is in, like “she’s going to fry”). In a film where the heroine’s machinations are so intense and deliberate, and her husband’s quest for honesty so hard-nosed and infuriating, it’s Barrymore — gleefully twirling his cane, with a walk that’s somewhere between a stagger and a swagger — who provides the ambiguity. You don’t know why he’s there, or what he’s up to, and some of his pronouncements are genuinely disturbing — but you can’t take as your eyes off him. (He threatens to steal the movie from Lombard, but her grip is too tight.) Only character actor Edgar Kennedy — as the cop who investigates the crime in question and decides to lay the blame at Lombard’s feet — isn’t quite up to the task at hand. As he begins to envision scenarios that match the evidence — all of which point to Helen’s guilt — she starts to spin tales alongside him, as if she’s found a creative soulmate. But Kennedy can’t seem to catch Lombard’s contagious spirit. (Who could?) But the movie stays brisk and clever through the courtroom scenes and beyond, and its final gag — when Ken tosses Helen over his shoulder, determined to make her latest lie a reality — is one of those classic bits you can’t believe got past the censors.

4. Arise, My Love (1940, Paramount): American flyer Tom Martin is rotting away in a Spanish prison, following his capture by Franco‘s Nationalist troops. But Tom — like most screwball heroes — is too cocksure for his own good. He’s named the rat in his cell Adolf, and when the priest who’s come to offer him last rites is alarmed by the sound of the firing squad and apologizes for his squeamishness (“This is my first execution”), Tom is quick to reassure him, “Don’t worry, Father, it’s mine too.” And when reporter Augusta “Gusto” Nash appears shortly before his execution, claiming to be his wife and having secured his freedom, she’s every screwball heroine with a talent for deception: “Oh! Oh! Tom, it’s you,” she exclaims, throwing her arms around this man she’s never met: “It’s you. It’s your funny old face!” She knows all the corny lines that will sound convincing to people who aren’t as smart as she is. Even when the comandante notices that Tom’s passport says “not married,” Gusto has an instant explanation, which she unleashes on Tom with mock outrage: “That’s how you got abroad! That’s how you enlisted! They never would’ve taken him if they’d known he was married.” And Tom — who still has no idea what’s going on — is right there picking up his cues: “Yup, that’s why I did it.” And thus Gusto — who’s engineered this ruse in search of a good story — engineers Tom’s escape. It would absolutely have been possible — easy, even — for the creative team to conceive these early scenes as pure drama. But that’s not what director Mitchell Leisen, writers Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder and stars Claudette Colbert and Ray Milland have in mind. They go for the laughs; they go for the surprises. They go for the hijinks and the derring-do. They go for the “getting out of town” spirit that was essential to screwball (e.g., It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth, Nothing Sacred), even if getting out of town here means escaping a Spanish prison by way of a car chase and a stolen plane. The best screwball couples thrilled to the element of danger that they themselves set in motion; they were obsessive tightrope walkers. And reporter Augusta “Gusto” Nash and flyer Tom Martin have it in spades. As they’re thousands of feet in the air, hoping to outrun the enemy before they run out of fuel, Gusto is typing away at her story while Tom stops maneuvering the plane just long enough to make a pass. (He compares her to an old girlfriend: “Same hair, same cheek bones. Precisely my type." And she sees right through him: “Listen, honey, after 10 months in jail, anything would be your type. A St. Bernard.") Nothing fazes these two. They’re being shot at by enemy aircraft, and they’re trading quips. And once Gusto and Tom touch down safely in France, the battle of wits leads — as it always does — to greater intimacy. She wants a career; he wants her. Misunderstandings ensue, but the tide begins to turn when he lures her to Maxim‘s. Tom pretends he’s waiting for a sultry Romanian his buddies have fixed him up with — but agrees to let Gusto to interview him in the interim. He cagily asks for advice on how to make a good first impression, prompting Gusto — as she suggests her favorite drink and favorite flower and favorite music, and he happily obliges — to basically unwittingly seduce herself. It’s one of the most romantic scenes in screwball, and one of the most important. Screwball made the battle between the sexes feel like a worthy pursuit, but there were numerous instances where the scars of battle seemed to sully the victory. Arise, My Love redresses the balance; it’s the most captivating of love stories. It was Colbert’s favorite of all her films, and I don’t think she was ever more luminous — or facile — or commanding. And Ray Milland — that most underrated and underused of leading men — cuts a dashing figure opposite her. The film covers the period after the end of the Spanish Civil War in the spring of 1939 through the fall of France in May of 1940; that the final 20 minutes turn serious is literally a casualty of war. Once the Germans occupy Poland, there’s no trying to sustain the screwball tone — how would you do it? Why would you want to? So Arise, My Love modifies its inflection. It never becomes one of those inspirational movies that Hollywood churned out during World War II with a cool, artless precision; the love story that’s been fashioned so beautifully ensures that the characters are never subordinated to the story-line, even when Gusto and Tom find themselves immersed in real-life events. And the early screwball tone proves crucial to the design. Arise, My Love is one of the first Hollywood films to take a stance against Nazism, and who better to do so — who had achieved greater audience rapport — than the screwball couple? Brutal honesty was their stock in trade; uplifting speeches could never sound hollow coming from them. The final 20 minutes allow the screwball couple to bring their talents to bear on a greater purpose, and although the U.S. wouldn’t officially enter the war for another year, it’s safe to say that where Gusto Nash and Tom Martin went, audiences followed.

3. Theodora Goes Wild (1936, Columbia): The first film about men’s liberation. Theodora Lynn lives in a staid New England town with her two maiden aunts. With the exception of the telegraph officer and the editor of the local paper, the town of Lynnfield — founded by Theodora’s ancestors — seems to be populated entirely by nosy spinsters, who delight in setting the town abuzz (and holding it hostage) with gossip and innuendo. They claim to stand for conservative small-town values, and nothing has incensed them more than a racy story that’s being serialized in the town paper, a trashy novel by one Caroline Adams called The Sinner. (The Lynnfield Literary Circle is quick to condemn the book, but of course, that doesn’t stop them from reciting whole passages from it at one of their meetings — just to get the full flavor.) But Caroline Adams, as it turns out, is in fact Lynnfield’s own Theodora Lynn; she wrote the book and sold it to a New York publisher, with the understanding that her identity would be kept a secret. And she might’ve taken that secret to her grave, if a trip to New York didn’t embroil her with the gadabout who illustrated her book cover — one Michael Grant — who’s fascinated by the disparity between the Caroline Adams he’d envisioned and this timid, repressed small-town creature. Michael decides that Theodora needs to be set free, and follows her back to Lynnfield, mischievously threatening to expose her unless she sets him up as the family gardener. Eventually, Theodora’s fury and fear give way to affection and even desire, and she gives in to her feelings for Michael — but what happens when she learns that he’s unable to reciprocate those feelings, because he’s been hiding secrets of his own? The first hour of Theodora Goes Wild is what the film would’ve been had screwball never existed; it would have been about a persistent man’s attempt to liberate an inhibited woman, and it would’ve been entertaining, if a bit sexist. But when the tables are turned in the second half, that’s when the real fun begins — and that’s when the movie ascends into the stratosphere — because the first hour has been done to death, but the rest is wholly unexpected. And the ways in which Theodora not only accesses her newfound liberation, but magnifies it and satirizes it — creating a public persona so bold and outrageous that it forces Michael to come to terms with his own hypocrisy — is the kind of giddy, escalating symmetry on which screwball thrives. Theodora Goes Wild proves an ideal showcase for Irene Dunne who — seeing herself a dramatic actress — was reluctant at first to join the screwball craze. But her performance is astounding; she clearly approached the role as she would a dramatic part, aiming to give the fullest portrait possible. (Fittingly, it snared her an Academy Award nomination.) The muted Theodora who’s mostly a mouthpiece for the outdated attitudes of her aunts; the timid creature who comes to New York City to meet with her editor, terrified that her identity will be revealed; the foolish woman-child who decides to dive into all the temptations the Big Apple has to offer, to prove to Michael that she’s someone she’s not; the tormented prey forced to come to terms with her resentment for her town and her love for a sympathetic stranger; and finally, triumphantly, the brash creation who flaunts her salaciousness and her stature, all in the interest of love masquerading as revenge — Dunne captures it all, and makes these disparate elements merge into one full-blooded creation. Her Caroline Adams is both a sendup of celebrity and a fully-grounded character with clear origins in Theodora Lynn; Dunne scores laughs without ever losing the reality and the gravity of the situation. (As her approving uncle reminds her, “A Lynn may go wild, but never silly.”) For a too-brief time in cinema history, women just weren’t just seen as the equal of men, but their superior; in most of the best screwball comedies, the women ultimately gain the upper hand. A sign of the decline of screwball is when all of these wonderful women start to apologize for their smarts and their authority. It’s almost startling, as Hollywood mores change as the country plunges into war, how the tone of romantic comedy changes too, into one where a successful but uptight woman — “the independent but frustrated female,” as Ray Milland tags her in the 1940 The Doctor Takes a Wife — needs to be thawed or tamed by a desirable man. It’s as if they forgot the punchline that screwball invented. (Dunne herself has to go through the indignity of being tamed in the 1942 Lady in a Jam, and thawed in the 1944 Together Again.) In the ’30s, a woman could have it all: the career she coveted, the identity she chose and a man who shared and amplified her spirit.

2. Bachelor Mother (1939, RKO): Ginger Rogers’ deadpan wit — and sullen way with a wisecrack — was never more engaging. Bachelor Mother seems scaled and pitched to her delivery; it comes at a time when screwball has grown so comfortable in its sensibility that it doesn’t need to rely on noisy altercations or slapstick anymore. (Ironically, it’s the anti-screwballs that emerge around this time — the ones that view a woman’s independent streak as a violation of nature — that grow more boisterous, as if to disguise the sourness at their core.) Here, Rogers’ Polly Parrish — struggling through the recession within the Depression — has found part-time work over the Christmas holidays manning a counter at Merlin’s department store, overseeing an uncommonly unwieldy supply of wind-up ducks. On Christmas Eve day, she receives the most unwelcome of holiday gifts: a pink slip. Taking her lunch hour to visit an employment agency, she spots a woman leaving a baby on the steps of a foundling agency; fearing the baby might topple over, she picks it up, and when the doors instantly open, the agents inside presume the baby is hers — and she spends the rest of the movie dealing with the fallout from that one simple misunderstanding. Rogers may be saddled with a baby, but it’s David Niven — as her boss, David Merlin — who becomes fascinated with that baby, and in turn with Rogers herself. In typical screwball fashion, he‘s the one who suffers the most indignities, often to her amusement: when he tries to return the baby to her during a dance-hall competition and gets tossed out on his ear; when he decides to enlighten her on the proper care of infants and nearly spoons food into the baby’s navel — because two pages in the book he’s chosen as his bible are stuck together. (Rogers: “I suppose if it had said, ‘Hang baby by neck,’ you'd have thought it very scientific.”) And when he informs her that he’s going to return her defective duck to Merlin’s, she knows just how badly that’s going to go for him — as indeed it does — and responds with a gently defiant interjection that punctuates the film: “ha ha.” The whole movie is a succession of “ha ha” scenes. In some ways it’s more sketch comedy than a full-on film, but tying it all together is the growing attraction between Rogers and Niven that they don’t see, but we do. And what’s more, every sketch pays off, except the brief one that doesn’t: a run-of-the-mill runaround at a water fountain, when you suddenly realize that director Garson Kanin’s hold on the material is a fabulous fluke. (He’d never again sustain a tone this successfully.) The most memorable sequence is the one that seemingly takes the film furthest from its premise, as Rogers joins Niven at a New Year’s Eve bash with his society friends, and he assuages her fear that she won’t know how to talk to them by announcing her as “the daughter of a Swedish manufacturer — just come over — [who] doesn’t speak one word of English.” Niven’s ruse allows the pair to converse, riotously, in mock Swedish — making a mockery of his highfalutin friends — plus there’s a killer pay-off at the end, when Rogers momentarily reverts to her native tongue, to devastating results. It’s the sequence you don’t see coming that you can’t imagine the movie without. (It’s not unlike Gable and Colbert‘s play-acting in It Happened One Night.) Because what ultimately makes Bachelor Mother a screwball — one of the best — isn’t just the misunderstanding at the start, or the variations that are run on it. It’s not just the battle of the sexes in which Rogers and Niven’s bickering betrays burgeoning affection. It’s not just the mistaken identity subplots, or the scenes that erupt in physical mayhem. It’s not just its witty display of female superiority or its gentle dissection of class disparity. It’s this scene here, in which Rogers and Niven, who have been at odds for the entire film, suddenly become simpatico — the wiliest of comrades and the savviest of farceurs — because they’re privy to a joke that no one else gets. And it’s that joke that unleashes and unites them. That’s the essence of screwball: its couples are the keepers of a secret, one that the rest of us can only guess at. And the nearly forgotten Bachelor Mother is one of the best secrets out there.

1. Midnight (1939, Paramount): American showgirl Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert) has invaded Europe intent on amassing a fortune, but so far things haven’t gone to plan. She pulls into the Gare de Lyon with only the evening gown she’s wearing (the rest of her belongings have been consigned to the municipal pawnshop in Monte Carlo). Alighting from the train, she hails the nearest taxi driver (one Tibor Czerny, played by Don Ameche), who turns out to be the kind of genuine guy she could come to care for — but an impoverished cabbie is not what brought Eve Peabody to Paris. Fleeing his charms — and ducking into a society party, which she deftly crashes — she stumbles upon a more promising scenario. Wealthy Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore) is looking for someone to lure a French gigolo away from his wife Helene (Mary Astor), and he sees Eve Peabody as the answer to a prayer. He’ll bankroll her, he’ll help establish her credentials; in short, he’ll be the best co-conspirator a golddigger ever had. In need of a nom de plume, Eve latches onto the first name that comes into her head: Czerny. (To her deep consternation, Tibor is still very much on her mind.) Flammarion supplies her with a mock title — and “the Baroness Czerny” is born: the American wife of Hungarian aristocracy, taking up temporary residence in Paris while her husband nurses some chronic health issues. No screwball throws better curveballs than Midnight; the script by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder is really built. It introduces the screwball couple, separates them — then sends each of them on a quest: her in search of a stipend, him in search of her. These quests intersect and collide in ways we never see coming. And as we move from the hustle-bustle of Paris to the Flammarions’ weekend home in Versailles, and the couple reconnects, Tibor and the Baroness are forced to wage a war of wits: to see if she can succeed in her scheme before he punctures it, to see if he can disarm her with his decency and desire. Although Ameche is the male lead, it’s Barrymore with whom Colbert shares most of her scenes, and screwball never had a more delicious pair of connivers. Eve has no compunction about her quest for money; in fact, she lays it out quite clearly in a story to Tibor near the start. (“I landed a lord [once] — almost.” “Almost?” “Well, the family got between us. His mother came to my hotel and offered me a bribe.” “You threw her out, I hope.” “Well, how could I, with my hands full of money?”) And yet, it’s clear that her attraction to Tibor gets under her skin; he’s a distraction she literally can’t afford. And although Tibor seems at first like a carefree cabbie, meeting Eve gives him purpose and focus; he proves as cunning as her, and it’s that cunning that ultimately wins him her hand. Every line — whether it’s establishing the premise, revealing backstory, setting a scene or furthering the plot — is a model of wit and precision. In the opening moments, as Eve stares from her train car at the stormy weather that awaits her, she intones, “So this, as they say, is Paris. Well, from where I’m standing, it looks an awful lot like a rainy night in Kokomo, Indiana.” Later, outside the late-night party at which Colbert and Barrymore meet, one of the guests — stepping out of her limo and bemoaning the same dreary drizzle — laments, “It always rains when Stephanie throws one of her dull parties. Even nature weeps.” This is a script with so many one-liners to spare, it can afford to take multiple potshots at the weather. Mitchell Leisen — Paramount’s premier director for nearly a decade, and a romanticist at heart — directs with style, warmth and grace: refusing to sacrifice atmosphere for speed, but nonetheless allowing the piece to achieve a velocity all its own. Leisen and Art Director Robert Usher (he also did Arise, My Love) fill the stage with expensive and expansive sets that don’t dwarf the comedy, but give it ample room to breathe. The luxuriousness of the surroundings only raises the stakes; the climactic scene — a breakfast on an opulent terrace in which Ameche tries to expose Colbert as a fraud, while she tries to depict him as a lunatic — is one of the deftest mise-en-scènes that ever graced the screen. The performances are uniformly excellent, but it’s Colbert — with her apple cheekbones and arched eyebrows, and whose voice always exuded the soothing sound of sanity — who’s irreplaceable; her best films infused her character with a confidence derived not just from gumption but intelligence. When Eve first arrives at the Flammarions’ weekend home, with gigolo Jacques Picot already clinging to her every word, she informs her host, “You know something? I've a crazy idea he may ask me to divorce my husband.” “And marry him?” Flammarion questions, cautioning her: “You don't know Jacques Picot.” “You don't know Eve Peabody,” she counters, and it doesn’t sound boastful. There’s nothing wrong with knowing when you’re on your game. The script keeps her machinations from ever seeming mercenary; it makes it clear that Eve has had some hard knocks, and we wish her only happiness. But in what form will that happiness come? If screwball is some uncommon blend of the heart and the head, then Midnight accesses both with ease. As Colbert plays her, Eve seems to have an angel perched on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Midnight, the zenith of the screwball era, speaks to the conflicting desires that lurk within us all — and it doesn’t judge us for them; the only question it asks is “which will prevail?”

Want more? If so, I serve up The 25 Best Film Noirs, and — as with my screwball essay — there are bound to be some titles you didn't see coming. And if you like old sitcoms as much as old screen comedies, I delve into Rhoda Season 3, Maude Season 2, Newhart Season 7, One Day at a Time Season 7, WKRP in Cincinnati Season 4 and Bewitched Season 2; serve up my 10 Best Episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Designing Women, WKRP in Cincinnati, Kate & Allie and Everybody Loves Raymond; pen an appreciation of the underrated Mike & Molly; and offer up some thoughts as to why The New Adventures of Old Christine took such a tumble in quality over its five seasons.