Five forgotten screwball comedy queens
The stereotype about old movies is that they were rife with sexism. It is undeniable that times have changed for the better in this respect, but it is also worth remembering that for much of the Golden Age of Hollywood, female-driven movies were the norm. There was even a whole genre dedicated to funny women. Screwball comedy emerged in the 1930s and was wildly popular for more than two decades. Featuring rapid-fire dialogue, it was driven by strong female characters who got all the laughs while her male co-stars either struggled to keep up or resigned themselves to being stooges.
The term ‘screwball comedy’ comes from a type of pitch in baseball that moves in the opposite direction of a typical curveball. In the film genre, it describes the way the main characters play off each other. Most screwball comedies are a battle of the sexes, following a tried and true story arc of a man and a woman who despise each other, only to discover at some point that they’re in love.
Today, Katharine Hepburn is perhaps the most famous star of screwball comedies. Bringing Up Baby remains the gold standard of the genre, thanks in large part to her absolute command of the screen and ability to hurl punchlines at a head-spinning pace. However, during the 1930s, when the genre was at its peak, she was far from the most famous screwball star, and although she is certainly one of the best, her continued fame should not eclipse the genius of her peers.
For those who love this era of comedy, the actors listed here will come as no surprise. But for anyone who has barely dipped a toe into these hallowed waters, these stars and their films will be nothing short of a revelation. You’re welcome in advance.
Myrna Loy
It took more than a decade for Myrna Loy’s comedic talent to be noticed. Having trained as a dancer, she spent much of the 1920s and early ‘30s playing dangerous vamps coming to lure men to their doom. With her dark hair and unusually large, wide-set eyes, she was typecast as exotic foreigners of indeterminate nationality, despite being born in rural Montana. However, in 1934, she was cast opposite William Powell, the heartthrob of the day, in the mystery-comedy The Thin Man. In the film, they play a wealthy married couple, Nick and Nora Charles. Nick used to be a detective but retired when he married Nora, an heiress whose family doesn’t approve of his profession.
Although the film is ostensibly about the couple solving a mystery, it became a hit because of the performances. Powell was a seasoned comedic actor at that point, but Loy more than held her own, alternating between dry wit and genuine warmth. She and Powell banter and drink their way through the film, and although he makes most of the jokes, she steals every scene. At first, she seems to be merely wryly tolerant of him, only to show that she is sweetly, slyly manipulating the action under the service. It isn’t the most overt example of a female screwball star stealing the limelight, but it is one of the most endearing.
The first film was such a success that it spawned no fewer than five sequels. Loy enjoyed continued success as a comedic actor throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s, including in two films opposite Cary Grant, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House. It is annoyingly very difficult to find clips of Loy in all her comedic glory, so you’ll just have to make a point of watching one of her films.
Jean Arthur
Jean Arthur was one of Hollywood’s great enigmas. Although she was known as the quintessential comedy star, she was reclusive in the extreme, avoiding interviews and shunning the spotlight when not on camera. She starred in three Frank Capra movies – Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936, You Can’t Take It with You in 1938, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washingtonin 1939, all of which painted her as a plucky, upstanding heroine. She often played independent, working women, but her humour always shone through. Movies like The Devil and Miss Jones, A Foreign Affair, and The More the Merriercemented her place as one of the greatest screwball actors of all time.
Unlike many of the other female stars in the genre, she wasn’t overtly goofy most of the time. Her characters are usually just single career women trying to get ahead in a man’s world, only to have some hapless male throw things into chaos. She played these situations better than anyone, managing to be both outraged and charming within the same facial expression, and adding more than a hint of deviousness into the mix when you least expect it.
The 1942 comedy The Talk of the Town remains one of her best and most underrated films, and she makes a different kind of foil to Cary Grant’s typical humour. Instead of being a zany thorn in his side like Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, she is a reluctant sparring partner, making her flashes of ridiculousness all the more hilarious.
Claudette Colbert
Like Myrna Loy, Claudette Colbert was typecast in dramatic roles throughout the first decade of her career. After renegotiating her studio contract, however, she was able to branch out into a wider range of genres, including screwball comedies. Of all the women who served razor-sharp wit in this subsection of 1930s cinema, Colbert brought a patrician, almost aloof air to her characters that might not at first seem like an obvious source of comedy. What made her so perfect for the genre, however, was the hard-edged, streetwise no-bullshittery she imbued in all her characters. She didn’t suffer fools, and that made life all the more treacherous for the men she crossed paths with.
Colbert starred in Frank Capra’s quintessential screwball comedy It Happened One Night in 1934. In it, she plays a haughty heiress who runs away from her family after they threaten to annul her elopement with a ne’er-do-well pilot. While trying to evade them, she meets Clark Gable’s down-on-his-luck journalist who thinks he can get a huge payday out of writing a tell-all story about her. They start out hating each other’s guts, but come to realise that their strong wills are perfectly matched.
Although this will always be her most famous role, it was far from the only screwball comedy that Colbert starred in. Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story, released in 1942, remains one of her best and most underrated.
Irene Dunne
I’m just going to come out and say it: Irene Dunne was Cary Grant’s greatest on-screen partner. Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell might have delivered lines the fastest. Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn might have shared sizzling chemistry with him. But Irene Dunne was on the same comedic wavelength. She could shut him down with a well-timed glare, walk circles around him with her wit, and still make you believe, by the end of the film, that she was madly in love with him. They starred in three films together – 1937’s The Awful Truth, 1940’s My Favorite Wife, and 1941’s Penny Serenade, their only drama together.
The Awful Truth is one of the greatest romantic comedies of all time, regardless of era. Like My Favorite Wife, it features a wonderfully liberal and unsentimental take on marriage. Lucy and Jerry Warriner (Dunne and Grant) are a wealthy couple going through divorce proceedings. But as they each explore relationships with new people, they begin to show a little too much interest in each other’s love lives.
Dunne was dry and sarcastic and could level a perfectly-timed eyebrow raise like no one else before Lucille Ball came along. In her pairings with Grant, she needles, cajoles, and shamelessly flirts with him, often all at the same time, in the middle of fights, and with her new alternative love interest standing behind her. They could make even the most ridiculous plot set-ups seem perfectly believable, as evidenced by My Favorite Wife, in which she plays a woman who, after living on an island for seven years and being presumed dead, turns up to find her husband married to another woman.
Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard was in a class by herself. No other female star was as influential as a comedian in the 1930s. She helped define the screwball comedy genre, and to this day, there has never been anyone who has captured the flurried essence of her on-screen persona. She was weird at a time when women weren’t supposed to be. She took up all the oxygen in a scene without making the other characters seem short-changed. And although she played characters who were often blithely oblivious to their surroundings, she herself was always in complete control.
20th Century, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, and To Be or Not to Be were her most famous roles. In them, she was a whirlwind of madcap energy, flitting from rage to heartbreak to coyness with head-spinning speed. She used her beauty as another prop, deftly tossing off devastating lines with the effervescence and nonchalance of someone who knows they can get away with anything.
Lombard died tragically young. During a trip selling war bonds in 1942, her plane crashed, leaving no survivors. She was only 33. It is remarkable that she managed to be such a pivotal and enduring force in American cinema despite such a brief career, and it’s hard not to mourn what could have been.
