Recorded at the Historic Camelot Theater, Palm Springs, CA on April 28, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
(ALIECE PICKETT:) Screwball heroines: Lubitsch led many fantastic characters to immortality in film history, through his career.
“Ninotchka” (1939) with Greta Garbo and her character’s personal evolution.
“Shop Around The Corner” (1940), and the “Klara” character.
They’re self-determined.
They’re go-getters.
They’re not domesticated.
They’re out.
They have careers, they’re working.
(MOLLY HASKELL:) When we talked about the escape from “domesticity”, this is a huge impulse in the Screwball heroine.
She doesn’t want to get stuck in the kitchen.
It was obvious with Claudette Colbert (“Palm Beach Story” 1942) when she talked about how pathetic she was as a cook.
Here, the minute it gets “wifey-heavy” when Fredric March wants a big glass of orange juice at every breakfast.
No!
>> AP: For today’s audiences, it’s important we think of what was happening at the time.
This is the advent of Screwball Comedy.
There were five major factors: One was the loosening restrictions on women.
This was huge, female characters, having roles outside the home.
>> MH: Physical and verbal.
The Production Code came in 1933.
Before that, you had “femme fatale” heroines.
You had Clara Bow, Paula Negri, and Greta Garbo in that role.
Silent and slinky sirens.
This was the beginning of sound, so they were closer to silent cinema.
Now you have the Hays Office and the huge importance of dialogue.
You have these women that are incredibly verbal and not silent siren-types, and physical.
They’re boisterous.
They do “unfeminine” things.
Even if they don’t have a job as we think of it, for a modern woman or feminist.
The physicality.
The way she talks in that opening scene.
The French, rattle, rattle, rattle off the French.
>> AP: She’s very confident.
>> MH: She steps right in. She’s the engineer of the whole scene.
She sets the tempo, and she decides to go in another direction.
She doesn’t do it in a bullying way, not in an aggressive way.
She does it in this incredibly sexy, charming way.
This may be my favorite of her roles.
>> AP: We’ll see her later in “Trouble in Paradise” (1932), with another great Lubitsch female character, Kay Francis as “Madame Colet”, a cosmetics executive.
>> MH: I think that is one of her most charming roles.
She’s always playing a tall, majestic woman.
She can’t play coy.
She’s often a little, almost too bossy.
She’s most often the second, but not the absolute star.
But there, she is, again, a rich executive.
She reigns over her domain.
At the same time, you yearn for her to win that I don’t remember in her other roles.
There’s something appealing and vulnerable.
And Miriam Hopkins is a “toughie”.
>> AP: “To Be or Not To Be” (1942) with the great Carole Lombard playing “Maria Tura”, is an accomplished actress.
Between husband and wife, she’s carrying the load in terms of the acting.
And she drives the plot.
Audiences took notice of these unusual, unconventional women, unconventional plots, characterizations.
It was special.
And so much was implied.
Nothing overt.
Everything discreet.
Clever double entendres.
Billy Wilder said to anyone who would listen, he wanted to emulate the model of Ernst Lubitsch, “Two plus two…”, let the audience do the calculation.
>> MH: He supposedly had a sign in his office that said, “What would Lubitsch do?”.
>> AP: Give the audiences the benefit of the doubt that they have the intelligence to figure things out.
Nowadays, it seems many filmmakers lead us by the nose.
Nothing is left to our imagination.
And it’s overt, the visual sexual depictions and language.
These films are refreshing.
>> MH: It’s amazing how sexy you can be without overt sex, without a lot of skin, and without copulation.
>> AP: Before we wrap up, two things: One, thank you, Ms. Haskell, for the extraordinary effort you made to come here from the East Coast to join us to celebrate Screwball Comedy.
And I would like to talk to you about something in your book “Frankly My Dear, Gone with the Wind Revisited”.
Many of our audience bought it at the reception and book-signing.
I’d like to follow up on your mention of the relationship of “Scarlett” and “Rhett”.
There’s a sexual dynamic between the two, and characteristics like Screwball Comedy.
Can you share more on that?
>>MH: Among the many things that are absolutely horrifying to read in “Gone With the Wind”, we have to make large allowances for the racism all the way through.
People have also criticized the “marital rape”, when “Scarlett” and “Rhett” had been married for a long time.
She still has this yearning for “Ashley”.
They clearly never had sex.
She’s so frigid, that’s what you feel.
She’s smart and tough and enterprising, but sexually cold.
Rhett carries her off to bed, and the next day she’s smiling, post-coital.
First, you have to look at it in context of its time.
And in the context of this particular relationship and what it’s trying to say.
And a different set of mores.
And Leslie Fiedler said about “Gone With the Wind”.
He was a big defender of popular culture against the elitists.
And he said, what I interpret is saying that you can hate something and love it at the same time.
You can dislike “Gone With the Wind” for all the prejudices that it shows.
But it’s also, and in this scene, you have to look at it as something that means this couple have been fighting and at loggerheads all the way through.
The idea of Screwball Comedy, and why it’s called the “Comedy of Remarriage”, is that you marry and then you hate each other.
Then you love each other again and get back together, or go to someone else.
But “love-hate” is always present.
This is a love-hate thing that finally has this moment of love.
>> AP: Through that conflict, you take a journey together as a couple.
You learn about each other.
>> MH: You grow up in some ways.
>> AP: And you earn each other as you go through it.
>> MH: You maybe don’t expect as much after that.
You’ve tempered your expectations.
That’s not terrible.
There’s something in it.
It’s more complex than the first flush of romance.
>> AP Thank you so much for being here. And thank you all for coming out.🎥
Film Society of Screwball Comedy©
Edited by Aliece Pickett
Copyright 2025