Screwball season arrives at the Australian Cinémathèque!

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 ...