Recorded at the Historic Camelot Theater, Palm Springs, CA on June 4, 2023
TRANSCRIPT
(LAUREN WOLFER:) Is this the perfect Screwball Comedy?
(ALIECE PICKETT:) It is pretty perfect, between the acting, writing, and underlying social issues, it’s powerful.
Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy, are all at the top of their game.
And the two interdependent plots, the relationship of “Hildy” and “Walter”; and the public hanging that’s impending.
The satire of marriage, politics, and the press.
And it’s not sentimental.
We just saw the end, the “happy” ending, there is no kiss, no embrace, they didn’t even look at each other!
>> LW: I love how she has the big bag, the coat, and everything.
He’s running ahead of her and not carrying anything.
It’s a perfect call back to the beginning.
Her character is iconic.
>> AP: She is probably the most complex of the Screwball heroines of the Classic Era, given the role reversal and her internal conflict.
She’s also flawed as a character.
It was revolutionary to see a woman in a man’s job. And her personality attributes were normally associated with men.
She was ambitious, hard-driving, and fast-talking.
Keeping up with the boys.
That was pretty radical at the time.
She was just being an ambitious reporter.
The internal conflict she suffers with her job versus marriage.
And her ex-spouse and her fiance, those internal fights.
Also, her flaw is hypocrisy.
She denounces the political corruption and irresponsible press. Yet she bribes the jailer to have access to the inmate.
She feeds the inmate a narrative so she can write a compelling story.
She doesn’t intervene when “Bruce’s” mother is kidnapped or when he’s arrested a second time.
>> LW: They’re made for each other!
You talk about the “anti”-heroic male being an essential part of Screwball Comedy.
She is an “anti”-hero as well, so it’s terrific.
I love it when these terrible people find each other, it’s beautiful.
This is the second Howard Hawks we’ve had.
We did “Bringing Up Baby” (1938), we have this, and “Ball of Fire” (1941).
Howard Hawks is such an incredible director.
I mean, the range.
>> AP: He is in the pantheon of great directors.
And his reputation has only increased over the decades.
He made films in every genre, successfully.
He was raised in an affluent family, and educated as an engineer.
He started in the Silent Era, then transitioned to the talkies.
Because he was mechanically minded, sound technology didn’t scare him.
He embraced it.
He was astute in his observation that in the first talkies, dialogue was artificial and theatrical.
Filmmakers had the actors speak very slowly.
Hawks sought naturalistic dialogue, which he got.
He realized that people interrupt each other.
And they talk fast in real life.
He wanted films to reflect that.
>> LW: One of my favorite movies is “The Big Lebowski” (1998), which we showed here last June.
One of my favorite things about that film is the dialogue, and that natural part of people stepping over each other.
Someone starts a sentence and then trails off.
It’s natural.
And in comedy it works well.
It’s fascinating to see the origins of that, with this film.
>> AP: It does start with Howard Hawks.
He had five collaborations with Cary Grant, all masterpieces.
And not only was the pacing of the dialogue important to him, it was also the dialogue itself.
He was a lover of words.
And he never worried about censorship, because he worked with the writers to make sure that through double-entendre, innuendo, and risque dialogue, he got his points across just fine.
>> LW: Cary Grant in this movie…every time we have Cary Grant in a film I say, “Cary Grant in this movie was so amazing”, because he is.
For me, my favorite is when he is playing a devilish character, like you saw in “The Philadelphia Story” (1940).
When he gets that little twinkle. And it’s so wonderful.
He’s the perfect foil for Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby” (1938), with his dorkiness. But this is the Cary Grant that personally is fantastic.
>> AP: This is right at the top.
Howard Hawks probably is known more now for his female characters.
>> LW: You were saying earlier about the “Hawksian Woman”.
Share with us what you said earlier.
>> AP: The “Hawksian Woman” is a phrase named by film critic Naomi Wise in 1971, after she saw Howard Hawks’ films and realized there was a common thread of female characteristics of his leading ladies.
To quote, “The ‘Hawksian Woman’ speaks her mind. She holds her own with the men with wit, fast talk, banter verbal bantering. She acts to get what she wants. She’s known by a nickname, not a forename like male characters. She often has the same profession as male characters. And she remains cool under stress. She’s one of the gang. And while still remaining feminine, she’s not a sex object”.
The excellent biography, a series of interviews with Howard Hawks, “Hawks on Hawks”, by Joseph McBride (Univ of CA Press 1982), devotes an entire chapter to the “Hawksian Woman”.
>> LW: That archetype fell out of favor in films.
>> AP: It relates to the federal government.
At the onset of World War II, men were going overseas, and the government was concerned of the economy crashing.
So they started a campaign, “Come on women, you’re equal to men. You can get out and do any job.
Let’s get you into the workforce.
It’s your patriotic duty to work”.
They really encouraged women to work with the “Rosie the Riveter” campaign.
Hollywood was in lockstep in showing working women as desirable and in a favorable light.
Now after World War II, the government had a new problem.
15 million American servicemen were now coming back.
The government had a strong interest in getting them re-assimilated into society and re-employed.
So, they changed the message to, “Come on women, give up your job for a man.
Go home, be at home. Do not work”.
Hollywood was feeling heat from the federal government for their “vertical monopoly”.
They produced films, they distributed films, and they exhibited films in theaters they owned.
They were terrified the government was going to break up the monopolies, which it did, eventually.
So they wanted to stay out of the crosshairs of the federal government.
Whatever messaging the government had, Hollywood was going to be in lockstep, giving that message through its films.
You see this pivot, very dramatic, of how women are portrayed in film.
Now, desirable women are women who are wives and mothers, and stay home and don’t work.
It was obvious and apparent. The writer Germaine Greer named this change in Hollywood, the female character, as the “female eunuch”, because they were powerless and passive.
That ended the “Hawksian Woman”.
>> LW: This film is another “Remarriage Comedy”, a big part of the Screwball genre.
What was it about the “Comedy of Remarriage” that that was so common? This film has the newspapers, the remarriage.
It checks all the boxes.
>> AP: There are a lot of Screwball Comedy plot-elements in this film.
Remarriage is one of the elements.
The writer Stanley Cavell wrote a book on remarriage and Screwball Comedy, “Pursuits of Happiness” (Harvard Press 1981).
To distill it down to three points, the first is “screwball” comedy is a plot device that allows writers to keep the couple separated, to develop the “battle-of-the-sexes”, fundamental to the Screwball Comedy.
Two, married couples are older and have more complicated relationships, and more challenging and interesting issues than young people who are dating–the typical couple in a “Romantic Comedy” genre film.
Third, married couples circumvent the censor rules.
There was strong censorship of film, that it not have sexual visual depictions or dialogue that implied a sexual relationship.
But if the people had been “married”, the censors didn’t worry about that.
There wasn’t the tight censorship.
Filmmakers could be freer with dialogue.
>> LW: It also gives you a chance to jump right into the bickering.
>> AP: They’re divorced.
>> LW: Let’s talk about racial tropes in this film.
Some of the jokes are not great, like the “piccaninnies”.
That’s such a product of the era.
>> AP: It was an era that went on, and on, and on.
>> LW: Yes, it is troubling, the black tropes.
It didn’t start with this film, and it didn’t end here either.
There is a racial slur in the film, and there is the implication about black constituents.
There’s something implied wrong that the mayor and the sheriff would be seeking and courting their vote.
There’s this huge political power that never actually existed.
>> AP: Yes, right.
>> LW: And the conspiratorial sort of thinking.
This isn’t as blatant as a lot of films.
>> AP: It is mild compared to other films that are so cringe-worthy and embarrassing, and have aged so horribly, and highlight the problems that have exacerbated our race issues in America.
>> LW: It happens so much with comedy.
There’s social reflection in comedy.
We showed the Eddie Murphy film “Trading Places” (1983), which is one of my favorite movies.
I love that film.
>> AP: And one of my favorite Ralph Bellamy films.
He plays one of the Duke brothers.
>> LW: That leads us to our next topic.
I love this film and that one.
I never connected those dots.
But the same thing.
We’re showing comedies from the 1980s.
“Trading Places” and, I put the disclaimer, “By the way, they thought it was appropriate to have Dan Aykroyd in blackface in this film”.
I think with exhibiting film, it can be difficult.
Again, this one is mild relative to a lot.
It is important to talk about.
I think that so long as there are disclaimers, that the egregious films maybe are not given as much play.
But it is good to have these discussions, to talk about what is problematic.
>> AP: Yes, we need to know where we’ve been.
People may not be aware of how endemic the problem is.
Think of the year before this film was released in 1940, the biggest film of all time, “Gone With The Wind” (1939) was released.
That film romanticizes the South and romanticizes the horrors of slavery.
You see across the board, in every genre of film, how blacks are depicted.
You don’t see blacks as reporters or editors, lawyers or doctors, any profession.
They’re relegated to being maids, and porters on trains.
They speak in broken English.
The implication is they’re illiterate and uneducated.
They are at service.
They don’t have personal lives.
You don’t see that developed.
What happens in a segregated society like America was, if you don’t have contact with black people, you’re learning, you’re getting “educated” from movies, that this is the way black people must be.
I can speak from personal knowledge on segregation.
My home is in one of the oldest parts of Palm Springs.
I had the opportunity to see old title documents to my home.
The neighborhood, when it was subdivided in the 1930s, there was a racial restriction.
When people aren’t living together, they grab their information, they get it from the movies.
Whether we like it or not, films affect public perception.
>> LW: Yes, that’s absolutely right.
Let’s go back to Ralph Bellamy.
He’s such a great foil for Cary Grant in this film.
His performance is subtle, but hilarious.
It’s perfect for Cary Grant.
>> AP: A “foil” is a secondary character that has opposite characteristics of the lead actor, to showcase the lead actor’s attributes. Here, you see Ralph Bellamy as shy and a little naive, a sympathetic character.
He loses the girl.
He is contrasting even in his appearance, with his blonde hair.
Ralph Bellamy was a master of sophisticated comedy.
He appeared in over 100 films, from the 1930s all the way through to his last film, “Pretty Woman” (1990).
Huge career, does a fantastic job.
>> LW: And Trading Places”.
Thanks for making that connection.
I love having these conversations with you, Aliece.
If there’s anything else you want to cover, we have a bonus question for a giveaway of “Dark Angel”, the Cary Grant biography by Geoffrey Wansell.
>> AP: I would like to finish our discussion talking about the one and only Cary Grant.
He is the definitive leading man.
He is insanely handsome, and charming, and irresistible.
He’s also brave.
No one talks about this.
With his good looks and popularity, the easy road for him to choose would have been “heroic” roles.
Earnest characters, moral people, honorable people.
Instead, he chooses to be the “anti”-hero.
Think about the despicable qualities that “Walter Burns” has.
He is an inveterate liar.
He has operatives and fixers working at his newspaper.
He gets “Bruce”, the fiance, arrested three times. He gets the mother kidnapped! He manipulates everybody. He’s unmoved when “Molly” the prostitute jumps out of the window.
He’s unmoved that “Bruce’s” mother may be dead from the car accident. And finally he is unable to tell “Hildy” that he needs her, or that he wants her to stay.
“Anti”-heroic attributes, yet we still root for him.
That is the genius of Cary Grant.🎥
Film Society of Screwball Comedy®
Edited by Aliece Pickett
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