Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals by Grégoire Halbout (review)

Known for its madcap antics, fast-paced dialogue, and marital tumult, screwball comedy is an enduring American film genre that grew roots in the late-interwar years. In Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals, a translation of his book published in France in 2013, Grégoire Halbout explores the genre’s multifaceted hybridity, describing the aesthetic, sociological, political, and economic factors of the 1930s and early 1940s that enabled screwball practitioners to find “a receptive audience” in the United States. Classical Hollywood-era screwball comedies reflect American society in flux, marred by “economic crisis and . . . upheaval” (3) and shifting ideas about democracy. They ruminate on the American dream mythology at a time when—to borrow a Hooverism echoed in My Man Godfrey (1936)— prosperity appeared to be even further around the corner than ever before. Halbout’s tripartite methodology considers the genre’s intertextuality, its formal and thematic “inflections,” and its ideological implications and demonstrates how public debates about the private sphere (sex, love, and marital discontent) symbolize an “incarnation of hope for a democratic renewal” (9). Through the vehicle of screwball comedy, Hollywood constructed, debated, and defended the American experiment (308).

Halbout’s approach to cinema is indebted to Stanley Cavell, whom he credits as an “overwhelming and long-lasting influence” (xiv). His scholarship fills in many of the gaps in Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage in its exploration of the all-important when and why Cavell does not take up in his formative text. Cavell’s study of the remarriage genre has fundamentally shaped subsequent scholarly approaches to screwball comedy, and it has contributed to the canonization of the seven films profiled in his book. One of the unintended effects of Cavell’s study has been the development of a rather rigid, auteur-driven definition of screwball comedy. Halbout’s book picks up where Cavell leaves off by expanding the screwball corpus to about 130 films and identifying the genre’s historical grounding and social function. Halbout reminds us that genre studies requires ongoing “contextualization,” both “cultural and political, within the institutional and professional cinematographic environment” (7). In doing so, he draws on the work of such scholars as John Cawletti, Jean-Loup Bourget, Thomas Schatz, Raphaëlle Moine, and Brian Henderson. Comedy, for Halbout, is an “expression of a mood and a tone” (7). It is also a form and a style. Halbout thus includes films that lie at the screwball margins. Some, like The Mad Miss Manton (1938), fuse screwball’s whimsy with other genre tropes, while others, like Theodora Goes Wild (1936), are screwy in every sense of the word but do not bear the markers of authorial valorization. Halbout avoids the temptation to fetishize a narrow canon and “redefines” the essence of screwball style (9) as that of hybridity.

Halbout begins with a taxonomy of characteristics as well as an outline of the genre’s origins, technological and cultural influences, and key players. This will be familiar territory for those already versed in the genre’s semantics and syntax, but it can be put to good use as a pedagogical tool and as course material. Where Halbout really makes strides is in his contextualization of screwball within the era’s industrial and sociopolitical climate, which makes the book helpful to those studying classical-era stardom, censorship, and production history. Halbout devotes a great deal of attention to the Production Code and deftly explains the stylistic, narrative, and social infrastructure behind the Production Code Administration (PCA)’s “ideological cleansing” (136) process. He effectively makes the case that the “increased entrenchment of American censorship” coincided with “the rise of cinema as mass entertainment and the emergence of a new middle class” (141) and that the code’s authors saw “an opportunity to forestall the moral deterioration of modern society” (147). Cinema was branded as a coercive ideological...