Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934-1945

Zusatztext Initiated and propelled by the writing of Stanley Cavell, Grégoire Halbout offers here a capacious yet discerning analysis of the remarkably fecund genre known by the disarming, perhaps misleading name screwball. Delighting in the glories of taking democratic entertainment seriously, Halbout treats readers to a lively taxonomy of the characteristics and criteria that make these films recognizable, including savvy assessments of the many directors who artfully troped love and sex into conversationthereby eliding with comic flair the chaste restrictions of the Hays Code. Moreover, despite the madcap and zany attributes of these plots and their characters, pursuits of happinessin their many incarnationsremain of immanent concern for one and all, on screen and off. In Halbout's company, we contend with the exigencies of marriage; the charged private and public spaces of intimacy and power; and the vexed romance of democracy. To these ends, Halbout seizes upon the narrative traits that keep these indelible films fresh, while encouraging us to ponder how and why they proliferated. Though readers familiar with Cavell's contributions will recognize his films in the line-up, they will also encounter an expanse of additional works that thrillplacing the achievements of the marquee instances in dialogue with the lesser known. Befitting his signal inspiration, Halbout sustains Cavell's influential investigation and extends it in dynamic ways, delivering in this volume what amounts to a now-indispensable companion for exploring the moral and aesthetic incitements of the genreespecially among its hilarious and profound exemplars. Informationen zum Autor Grégoire Halbout is Emeritus Associate Professor of English and Cinema at the University of Tours, France. He writes in French and English about Hollywood comedy and the social function of cultural industries, as well as gender and sexuality in contemporary film and television. Klappentext A 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Love at first sight, whirlwind marriages, break-ups, divorces, remarriage. What accounts for the enduring success of the Hollywood madcap comedies of the 1930s? Directed by masters of comedy (Hawks, LaCava, Leisen, Ruggles...) and featuring the decade's most iconic stars (Colbert, Dunne, Grant, Hepburn...), these films set romantic comedy standards for decades to come. Screwball comedy embarked on two challenging missions: to poke fun at established social norms and to undermine stereotypical depictions of gender roles, putting forward a discourse that postulated the possibility of equality between men and women. Grégoire Halbout's reexamination of screwball comedy provides a comprehensive overview of this (sub)genre, eschewing the auteurist approach and including "minor" works never before analyzed through the screwball lens. His book explains how these screwball stories met the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for the liberalization of morals, with daring plots, verbal humor and slapstick techniques. Building on the work of Cavell, Altman and Gehring, as well as international and French scholarship, Halbout's investigation unfolds in three parts. He first establishes a definition of Hollywood screwball comedy through a cross-sectional analysis of its socio-historical context and an in-depth examination of the genre. He then situates screwball comedy in relation to its institutional context. An exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic meant to subvert the prohibitions of the 1934 Hollywood Production Code through a verbal and visual rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre's placement of romantic intimacy at the center of the public sphere and the democratic debate, confirming that screwball eccentricity upholds America's founding values: freedom of speech, free consent, and contra...

Autorentext
Grégoire Halbout is Emeritus Associate Professor of English and Cinema at the University of Tours, France. He writes in French and English about Hollywood comedy and the social function of cultural industries, as well as gender and sexuality in contemporary film and television.

Zusammenfassung
A 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

Love at first sight, whirlwind marriages, break-ups, divorces, remarriage What accounts for the enduring success of the Hollywood madcap comedies of the 1930s?

Directed by masters of comedy (Hawks, LaCava, Leisen, Ruggles...) and featuring the decade's most iconic stars (Colbert, Dunne, Grant, Hepburn...), these films set romantic comedy standards for decades to come. Screwball comedy embarked on two challenging missions: to poke fun at established social norms and to undermine stereotypical depictions of gender roles, putting forward a discourse that postulated the possibility of equality between men and women.

Grégoire Halbout's reexamination of screwball comedy provides a comprehensive overview of this (sub)genre, eschewing the auteurist approach and including minor works never before analyzed through the screwball lens. His book explains how these screwball stories met the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for the liberalization of morals, with daring plots, verbal humor and slapstick techniques.

Building on the work of Cavell, Altman and Gehring, as well as international and French scholarship, Halbout's investigation unfolds in three parts. He first establishes a definition of Hollywood screwball comedy through a cross-sectional analysis of its socio-historical context and an in-depth examination of the genre. He then situates screwball comedy in relation to its institutional context. An exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic meant to subvert the prohibitions of the 1934 Hollywood Production Code through a verbal and visual rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre's placement of romantic intimacy at the center of the public sphere and the democratic debate, confirming that screwball eccentricity upholds America's founding values: freedom of speech, free consent, and contractual engagement.

Inhalt
Foreword
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Being happy
Line of descent: from remarriage comedy to screwball film
Deploying a new approach to an indeterminate and unstable genre
A social and political reading of a typically American genre

Part One The screwball expression: a genre shows its credentials
Preamble: the fertility of Hollywood comedy in the 1930s

Chapter One: Proof of identity
The origins of the genre
1934, a pivotal year
The Americanization of fictional sources
A matter of language
The etymology and the improbable trajectory of the term screwball
Genre signaling in film discourse and movie reviews

Chapter Two: Protagonists: the artisans of screwball comedy
The directors at the helm
The reign of the jack of all trades
The director and the screwballization of scripts
The actors, stars of the genre
American actors for American stories
The stars, genre reference points
Screwball timbres and tones
The importance of the background: recurring secondary characters

Chapter Three: Narrative tropes and genre categories
Preliminary decryption
Narrative structures: New Love, Old Love and fornication forestalled
Plot types, a descriptive catalogue
A first attempt at a delineation of narrative tropes
Conditions precedent: zeroing in on the couple
The masquerade and the faces of conflict
The ordeal of alterity
Crises of identity
Cocktails and genre mixing
The impact of current events
Tones and subjects: a repetitive and polymorphic genre
A generation…

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