‘Hollywood Screwballs’ brings together a selection of canonical classics, formative films, and revisionist revitalisations of the screwball comedy genre. The program will be presented exclusively from rare 35mm prints sourced from film archives around the world.
The screwball comedy is one of the great treasures of American cinema. Emerging in the 1930s, these fast-talking farces subverted the conventions of romantic comedies with acid-tongued wit and slapstick silliness.
The genre rose to prominence amid the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, with audiences responding to the intermingling of metropolitan glamour and acerbic class commentary. Famously described by critic Andrew Sarris as ‘sex comedies without the sex’, screwball comedies had their would-be couples evading the censorious Hays Code with artful innuendo and risqué repartee.
The immense success of these films fostered the iconic status of many of their stars, including Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and Barbara Stanwyck. They also proved fertile behind the camera, propelling the careers of legendary writers and directors such as Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges.
After a decade of popularity, screwball comedies declined in prevalence, though their influence remains woven through many subsequent forms of screen comedy. Filmmakers raised on the golden age of the genre would also revisit its distinct characteristics in later decades, blending screwball sensibilities with modern cinematic stylings.
Hollywood Screwballs
Australian Cinémathèque, GOMA, Brisbane
26 July – 9 August 2023
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au
