Good Movies for Bad Times

The 1930s come up in the media a lot these days, but usually in a kind of a downer sort of way. Ushered in by the infamous stock market crash of 1929, the 1930s were a lean decade, leaner than just about any other in American memory.

What you might not know about the 1930s is that some of the best comedic films ever made were produced during that same lean period. During the Great Depression, people went to the movies to escape. They didn’t want to watch documentaries about standing in breadlines and losing the farm—that was all too real, all day, every day—instead they wanted to have a bit of fun and fantasy, even if only for an hour or two. The movie business thrived. People were broke, but most of them would find a way to scrape up a nickel to go the movies.

The ‘screwball comedy’ is a genre piece that follows a set formula. Screwball comedies map the trajectory of an unlikely romance, and in doing so, illustrate the aphorism, “The course of true love never runs smooth.” Or, put another way: Just because two people hate each other is no reason why they can’t fall in love.

Early on in each of these films two opposite types of people are thrown together by unlikely circumstances in what the movie industry likes to call a ‘meet cute’. Often one of them is rich and one is not, or one is a scoundrel or a goofball, the other is tight-laced and high-minded. These two misfits proceed to annoy the snot out of each other as they negotiate some insane situation central to the film’s convoluted plot, and by the end of it all they suddenly realize that they are in fact madly in love.

Audiences in the ’30s couldn’t get enough of these flicks. Year after year Hollywood pumped them out and year after year an eager public lapped them up. Irene Dunne (the undisputed queen of screwball comedies) was nominated for Best Actress five times during the 1930s for her portrayal of sassy, eccentric young women who fall in love with (usually rich) unlikely men.

Every film Irene Dunne ever made sold out to adoring crowds, and yet she never won an Oscar, despite being one of the most beloved American actresses in film history. My grandmother was a big Irene Dunne fan. Lots of women my grandmother’s age were big Irene Dunne fans. When you see her in one of these comedies, you’ll know why.

Screwball comedies often emphasized the inherent decency lurking beneath the surface of both rich and poor alike, and they always celebrated the iconoclastic personality in any crowd. If the moral underpinnings of the stories were basic and traditional, the action certainly was not, and the dialogue was always spicy enough to burn just a little, so that by the time you got the dose of sugar and cream at the end, it was all just about right.

If you are lucky enough to get cable TV, you can still watch the screwball comedies of the 1930s for free on the Turner Classic Movie Channel. It’s amazing how contemporary and smart these comedies feel seventy years (and more) later, and it’s also amazing how racy they can sometimes be. For my money, there’s nothing sexier than a 1930s satin gown—although I don’t think they made them any bigger than a size 2. For that matter, from a woman’s perspective, screwball comedies are worth watching just for the hats and shoes.

They don’t make clothes like that anymore.

What follows is a very personal list of my favorite 1930s screwball comedies.

Feel free to add your own:

It Happened One Night (1934)

This classic 1934 comedy directed by Frank Capra of It’s a Wonderful Life fame, stars Claudette Colbert as a spoiled heiress who jumps ship to run after a playboy, and Clark Gable as a down-on-his-luck reporter who promises to help her find the guy and get home safely in exchange for the right to tell her story for his newspaper. Of course, he falls for her, and hilarity ensues.

It Happened One Night gives modern viewers a peek at real life during the Depression. We meet a guy who earns his living picking up (and rolling) hitchhikers—but only when he’s not playing a hitchhiker himself so he can steal cars. We learn that it isn’t unusual for people to go a day or two without food. We see people lined up to use the single shower at a roadside motel. We see a mother and child who have not eaten for days on a bus, and we see one of the main characters give away their last spare dimes so that can change.

An interesting tidbit about the film is the fact that Clark Gable’s character in It Happened One Night was Mel Blanc’s inspiration for Bugs Bunny’s famous, “What’s up Doc?” line in the Warner Brothers cartoons. In one scene in the movie, Clark Gable and Colbert munch on carrots (having money for nothing else) while hitchhiking, and Gable does end up reciting the now famous line with a mouthful of beta carotene (carrots!).

A spontaneous rendition of “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” that takes place on a bus is lots of fun, and also gives a certain insight into the spirit of the times.

Theodora Goes Wild (1936)

In this smaller, less celebrated screwball comedy, Irene Dunne plays a small town innocent who secretly pens a torrid romance novel and then gets involved with Melvyn Douglas, the illustrator of the jacket for her book. Lots of confusion swirls around Theodora’s true identity, which the town speculates may be more blue-blooded and monied that she claims.

The movie is fun to watch just because Dunne is always fun to watch. The clothes are great, and the writing is pretty sharp. A crazy ending which involves a baby that Theodora picks up on a train and intentionally lets the townspeople think is hers (out of wedlock) provides a rare and smart insight into the morals and moral hypocrisies of the time—an insight that is almost shocking even today if only because she has so much fun with it.

It’s easy to fall into the habit of assuming that anyone who lived through any decade of the last century that preceded the 1960s was almost certainly uptight and repressed, but that would be so very incorrect. There were reasons the 1920s were called the roaring twenties.

Theodora Goes Wild gives a little taste of what some of those reasons were.

The Awful Truth (1937)

Speaking of married people who get divorced then remarry, or maybe never get divorced at all even though they plan to do so, The Awful Truth takes up that very same theme. The film stars Cary Grant as a soon-to-be ex-husband who tries hard to ruin his soon-to-be-ex-wife Irene Dunne’s love life, and vice versa.

“Comedies of remarriage” were popular during this era, and many films played with the theme of the always-fighting pair who coincidentally really love each other. The original “comedy of remarriage” was Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and the device has never really grown old. (Another popular variation was the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story starring Grant and Katherine Hepburn as two people whose cleverness ran ahead of their own true desires again and again.)

Dunne is so much fun to watch in this film, and Cary Grant is great. It was in The Awful Truth that Cary Grant first discovered his ability to play light romantic comedy. He initially was frustrated by the director’s penchant for improvisation, and actually tried to back out of the movie and hand his role over to actor Ralph Bellamy (the boring insurance agent in His Girl Friday). The fact that he didn’t probably changed the course of his entire career.

My Favorite Wife (1940)

In this film, Cary Grant once again plays husband to Irene Dunne, only this time, he has just married Gail Patrick because Dunne has been missing for seven years and been declared dead after a tragic shipwreck. The film begins with Grant going before a judge to nullify his first marriage so he can begin his second—a scene that is worth watching for its own sake. (The judge is great. He could have worked for the Bush administration.)

Naturally, no sooner does the judge grant the annulment than Dunne shows up at their old home. Her children don’t recognize her, but her mother-in-law does, and soon Dunne is off the break up the honeymoon with her mother-in-law’s blessing. Things get a lot more complicated when Grant discovers that Dunne was not alone all those years after the shipwreck: She was on a tropical island with Randolph Scott.

Dunne and Grant have such amazing chemistry they really do make contempory romantic comedies look kind of anemic by comparison. The plot device may be a tad tortured but the film is really funny and fun to watch. And again, there’s those great clothes…

His Girl Friday (1940)

This screwball comedy came along late in the game but it’s one of my favorites. It stars Cary Grant as newspaper editor Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as his star reporter (and ex-wife) Hildegard ‘Hildy’ Johnson. Hildy is about to marry a very bland, very boring insurance agent played by Ralph Bellamy.

Walter decides to ruin their plans by drawing Hildy into covering one last story for his paper, and over the course of her reporting he kidnaps her mother, has Bellamy arrested over and over again on trumped up charges, and ends up taking a trip to Niagra Falls with her to cover a strike… oh yeah, and marry her again maybe.

His Girl Friday is notable for the great, fast-paced dialogue and the chemistry between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. Ralph Bellamy is GREAT as a boring insurance agent, and Rosalind Russell wears the hell out of some killer suits.

The Philadelphia Story (1940)

The Philadelphia Story is another ‘comedy of remarriage’ starring a very young Katherine Hepburn as a wealthy socialite divorced from one C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) who is planning a second marriage to a ‘man of the people’ (played by John Howard). Jimmy Stewart plays a tabloid reporter who has been granted the rights to cover the wedding, and all these men vie for Hepburn’s attentions at her parents posh Philadelphia high society mansion.

Speaking of those satin gowns, Hepburn does one of them justice and then some in this film, and once again, the whole thing is worth watching for the clothes alone. Much more fun is in store however (above and beyond the sartorial confection of the whole thing), and of course there are lots of mistaken ideas about infidelity that didn’t really happen and impropriety that constantly does happen. In the end Hepburn winds up at the altar with no groom. Who will step up to fill in for ‘the man of the people’? (Come on, you knew she wasn’t going to marry that guy from the git go!) You’ll have to watch the movie to find out but I bet you can guess.

That’s All Folks!

This is by no means an exhaustive list of Depression era froth, but it will get you started if you’re feeling kind of down and want to kill a Saturday in your jammies. I recommend plenty of popcorn and chocolate, and if you can find a friend, or at least a nice dog, it’s fun to watch these with company.

It’s funny how constraints on film topics and budgets seemed to produce better films. Today, with CGI special effects a given and movie budgets in the millions and gazillions of dollars, it seems what we mostly get in film are tits, asses, and buckets of gore and goo, but back in the day, you had to actually tell a good story to get people to the movies, and you had to make the dialogue witty and real. Certain topics were off the table, which mean double entre was elevated to an art, and fashion had to fill in for nakedness.

I kind of miss that.

But I don’t have to miss it for long. Happily, most of these films are still very available. Check them out. I promise you’ll happier once you have.