Tags: Screwball Comedy
C+ |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
One should be rooting for Cary Grant to get the girl, which means he ought to deserve her — and if that’s more or less the case here, well, it’s only because the girl turns out to be no great shakes either.
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C |
**½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
Call me an Albany-living mama’s boy, but when Hildy tells her male colleagues in an early scene that she’s going to be a woman, not a news-getting machine, and have babies and take care of them, and give them cod-liver oil and watch their teeth grow, and not have to worry any more about crawling up fire escapes, getting kicked out of front doors, or eating Christmas dinners in one-armed joints — well, I for one think that sounds kind of nice.
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B+ |
***½ |
-1|
Teens & Up
Often credited as the first screwball comedy, Howard Hawks’s
Twentieth Century is an acerbic satire of show-business ego and superficiality starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Kids & Up
Possibly the screwiest of all screwball
comedies,
My Man Godfrey is the ultimate Depression-era
satire of the idle rich and tribute to the noble poor.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Teens & Up
This theme of romantically linking an upper-class society girl
and a man beneath her station would become a popular device in
screwball comedies, appealing to Depression audiences both as
escapist entertainment and as satire of the idle rich and
celebration of the hardworking poor.
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A- |
***½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
She’s fleeing from her concerned father (Walter Connolly) and
returning to the shiftless beau (Jameson Thomas) she married in a
civil ceremony to spite her father (who had her whisked away from
the service, so it’s not final legally or sacramentally).
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
The prologue, with its storybook-like, slightly arch voiceover narration finely read by Audrey Hepburn, suggests a charming fairy tale with a satiric subtext. And, indeed,
Sabrina, Billy Wilder’s delightful romantic comedy starring Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden, is a sort of Cinderella story, with a chauffeur’s daughter who is transformed into the belle of the ball and dances with the prince — except that the "prince" is, if not a beast, at least a shallow cad, while the real love interest is almost more a frog than a prince.
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A+ |
**** |
+0|
Kids & Up
The zaniest, most delightful, most romantic screwball comedy of them all,
Bringing Up Baby features Katherine Hepburn at her effervescent best and Cary Grant in a marvelous performance combining stuffiness and injured dignity with his usual debonair charm.
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B |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Yet where Hepburn’s character was merely flighty, Judy Maxwell
exists, like the Cat in the Hat and Bugs Bunny (note the title
line and the carrots she munches in one scene), in the mode of
the Trickster archetype, with inscrutable motives, capricious
behavior, and almost preternatural abilities, capable of
whimsically making Bannister’s life a living nightmare — or
putting things to rights again at a moment’s notice.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
Sullivan wants to address the problem of human suffering, but
his producers argue, rightly so, that he doesn’t know enough
about suffering to make a movie about it. But their attempts to
dissuade him backfire when he decides to go on the road with ten
cents in his pocket in an effort to experience poverty
first-hand.
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A- |
***½ |
+1|
Teens & Up
Audrey Hepburn is utterly beguiling in her star-making role opposite Gregory Peck in
Roman Holiday, a delightful romantic comedy about a poised young princess of an unspecified European country who spends a magical day with an American reporter (Gregory Peck) in the Eternal City, playing hooky from her official duties.
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A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up
Like the heroines of
The Awful Truth and
His Girl
Friday, Katherine Hepburn plays a divorcée caught
between flawed ex-husband Cary Grant and a respectable but
somehow unsuitable fiancé (John Howard). But
The
Philadelphia Story goes beyond the formula by throwing in
surprise contender Jimmy Stewart as a disgruntled
novelist-reporter — an unexpected source of conflict and
uncertainty that eliminates the need for Grant to resort to the
underhanded tricks he needed to show up his rivals in
Awful
Truth and
Girl Friday.
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A- |
***½ |
+0|
Teens & Up
Often described as "the best Hitchcock movie
Hitchcock never made,"
Charade stars Cary Grant and Audrey
Hepburn in a sparkling thriller with overtones of screwball
romantic comedy — or is it the other way around?
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