Romantic Comedy
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Romantic Comedy Romantic comedy in its most general meaning includes all films that treat love, courtship, and marriage comically. Comic in this context refers more to the mood of the film and less to its plot. A film comedy need not have a happy ending, nor do all films that have happy endings qualify as comedies. Of course, the great majority of romantic comedies do have happy endings, usually meaning the marriage of one or more of the couples the plot has brought together. The humor of these films typically derives from various obstacles to this outcome, especially miscommunication or misunderstanding between partners or prospective partners. For this reason, most romantic comedies depend heavily on dialogue. While they may also make use of physical humor and other visual gags, romantic film comedy remains close to it theatrical predecessors. Theatrical romantic comedy is a distinct, historically specific genre that emerged with Shakespeare's comedies in the sixteenth century. It combines elements of two earlier forms having antithetical views of love and marriage. One ancestor is the New Comedy of ancient Greece, which centers on a young man who desires a young woman but who meets with paternal opposition. The play ends with some turn of events that enables the match to be made. Comedy here represents the integration of society, the concluding wedding standing for social renewal. The other ancestor is medieval romance, which appeared in both narrative and lyric poems. Romance here names a new sense of love— the passionate experience of the individual—distinct from the "social solidarity" love had previously meant. Romance was originally opposed to marriage, but in Shakespeare's comedies, such as Much Ado About Nothing, romantic love and marriage are united. Romantic comedies ever since have told audiences that their dreams of the right mate can come true. Romantic comedy in film falls into four distinct subgenres: romantic comedy proper, farce, screwball comedy, and the relationship story. Each of the subgenres is defined by the ways in which love, romance, and marriage are depicted and, especially, how they are related to each other. SILENT AND PRE-CODE ROMANTIC COMEDY Filmic romantic comedy in the United States derived most directly from the stage. While higher forms of comedy were produced on stage before 1915, theatrical comedy was dominated by vaudeville, minstrel shows, and musical reviews. Vaudeville and other forms of "low" comedy were the first to influence film, and this influence accounts for the bulk of silent film comedy. Farce typically deals with characters who are or have previously been married, and it derives its humor by calling attention to the restrictions and boredom often felt by long-married couples. But farce also typically accepts marriage as the norm, and depicts extramarital sex as immoral. Beginning in 1915, however, Broadway theater generated a vogue for sex farce, which remained very popular through the early 1920s. These plays featured suggestive language and situations, and they often set out to test the limits of what authorities would permit. Given the limitations of silent film and its audience, it is not surprising that farce should be the first form of romantic comedy to become an established film genre. Most silent comedy is farce in the broadest sense of the term, since it is most often low and physical. What have been called the silent comedies of remarriage could better be described as toned-down sex farces, though their use of divorce reflects its increasing frequency in America at that historical moment. Cecil B. DeMille (1881–1959) made three such films: Old Wives for New (1918), Don't Change Your Husband (1919), and Why Change Your Wife? (1920). As if to illustrate the difficulties of silent romantic comedy, these films, like many American silents, are heavily dependent on title cards, which present proverbial cynicism about marriage. In Why Change Your Wife?, marriage is illustrated by a scene repeated between the husband and each of his wives. As he tries to shave, his wife interrupts him repeatedly, refusing to acknowledge that finishing the shave might reasonably be something the husband should do prior to helping his mate. One expects, given this repetition, that when the husband remarries wife number one, she will revert to type, but the film ends with a title card expressing a previously absent faith in the ability of the romance to last. The new lesson is aimed at women: forget you are wives and continue to indulge your husband's desires. In The Marriage Circle (1924), Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947) used subtle gestures and expressions to convey complex emotions among six interrelated characters. Here, irony replaces more overt mockery of marriage, and the film treats its subject without moralizing. Other silent films staged romantic comedy by importing conventions from slapstick comedy and melodrama, as does It (1927), which made Clara Bow (1905–1965) ever after the "It Girl." The story of the ultimately successful cross-class courtship of Bow's shop girl and her employer, the department store's owner, the film uses its title to refer to a special sexual magnetism that a lucky few enjoy. It thus offered an attempt at explaining the power of romantic love, as well as its own improbable plot. The sound era brought a raft of romantic comedies adapted from the stage. In the pre- Code era (1928–1934), the farce continued to be the dominant form. Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932) is a film in which infidelity and even grand theft are treated as if they were at worst the cause of minor discomfort. Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall play a pair of jewel thieves who become lovers and take jobs with the owner of a perfume company (Kay Francis). Other pre-Code farces include Platinum Blonde (Frank Capra, 1931) and two adaptations of Noel Coward plays, Private Lives (Sidney Franklin, 1931) and Design for Living (1933), directed by Lubitsch. The pre-Code period also saw the emergence of romantic comedy proper. A pure example of the genre is Fast and Loose (1930), adapted in part by Preston Sturges (1898–1959) from the play The Best People by David Gray and Avery Hopwood. Here a wealthy father, Bronson Lenox (Frank Morgan), intervenes to prohibit the cross-class loves of both his son and daughter. THE SCREWBALL ERA During the screwball era—1934 through the early 1940s—romantic comedy was one of Hollywood's most important genres. Named for the zany behavior and improbable events that it depicts, screwball comedy combines elements of farce and traditional romantic comedy. Like the former, it typically deals with older, previously married characters, putting them into risque ́ situations; like the latter, screwball comedies end with a wedding, thus affirming, rather than questioning, the connection between romantic love and marriage. The screwball form first appeared in 1934, on the cusp of the new production code, along with Frank Capra's (1897–1991) It Happened One Night (1934) and Howard Hawks's (1896–1977) Twentieth Century (1934). It Happened One Night, which swept the major Academy Awards in 1935, developed the strategy of indirect eroticism that builds between the central couple, a strategy that became all the more important after the Code prohibited more overt sexuality. In Twentieth Century Hawks introduced the fast talk that would reach its extreme in His Girl Friday (1940), where he encouraged actors to talk over each other's lines. Both of these techniques would help define romantic comedy of this period. One group of screwball comedies has been identified by Stanley Cavell as comedies of remarriage. In addition to It Happened One Night, these include some of the most important romantic comedies of the studio era: Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday, Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941), and George Cukor's (1899–1983) The Philadelphia Story (1940), and, although not a screwball Adam's Rib (1949). Cavell argues that in depicting genuine conversation between lovers, these films tell us something about marriage. Unlike most previous romantic comedies, these films show us the growth of a relationship between the central couple. Yet Cavell's point is undermined by the fact that these films deal with characters who are not married to each other and who often seem to be in quasi-adulterous relationships. It thus seems that they mystify marriage by blurring the boundaries between it and an illicit affair. Proper romantic comedies continued to be made after 1934, but they remained a subordinate form. Lubitsch made one of the most significant, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), in which the father, Mr. Matuschek (Frank Morgan), owns a shop where the central couple, Alfred Kralik (James Stewart) and Klara Novak (Margaret Sullavan), are employed. They fall in love by correspondence, so they do not know that they have fallen for a co-worker. At work, in person, the two do not get along. This provides for some of the competitive bickering familiar from Much Ado About Nothing's Beatrice and Benedict, which became a feature of screwball comedies as well. But what distinguishes this film as a proper romantic comedy rather than a screwball comedy is that the lovers are young (implicitly virgins) and their relationship untriangulated. The importance of romantic comedy in this era is demonstrated by its leading stars, whose reputations and personas were established in such films, and the leading directors who made at least one romantic comedy, including even Alfred Hitchcock (Mr. and Mrs. Smith [1941]). Carol Lombard (1908–1942), the female lead in Hitchcock's film, was a star especially identified with romantic comedy.