ONE SOCIAL tendency in the contemporary world is to flippantly relegate Hollywood films from say the 1930s to 60s into a past irrelevant or even obsolete era of filmmaking, which has little meaning for a new generation around the world.
Of course, people want to market the work of today’s cine-artists, but we should keep evaluating previously made films on the basis of their perennial relevance, especially in areas out of North America or Europe today. To simply uncritically accept negative views towards the value of film culture’s history would seem to belong to programmed followers of trends created by self-serving others.

Screwball film culture

It had been presumed by Hollywood film marketing agencies that ‘screwball comedies’ had run their course by the end of the 1930s, and the style had become stale and predictable, making it necessary for another trend in Hollywood filmmaking to begin. Such a premise was only partly true, however, since ‘screwball comedies’ continued well into the 1940s, with its best actors and actresses like Grant, Gable, McCrea, Katherine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Jean Arthur, even Barbara Stanwyck.
What did occur was an increase of the ‘screwball comedy’ film style by less capable writers, actors, and directors trying to jump on the bandwagon, but without the talent and skill of Cary Grant or the others mentioned above. Today, a careful critical study of Grant’s and other 1930s  and 40s ‘screwball comedy’ films reveal extremely relevant social lessons related to equitable and just class and race relations; respect for independent working women; appreciation of gentlemanly qualities which do not mean that such men are effeminate or homosexual; tolerance and enjoyment of women who are not interested in the convention of marriage, yet remain romantically attracted to men, including those who may not be as economically well off as their female lover, yet are no less a man because of this material inequality.
Cary Grant would help demonstrate most of these values in his 1930s, 40s, and 50s films, many of which could be called ‘screwball comedies’. But we should look at a few other major 1930s films in the screwball style, such as Frank Capra’s ‘IT HAPPENNED ONE NIGHT’ of 1934, and Mark Sandrich’s ‘MAN ABOUT TOWN’ of 1939.

Comedy as satire

Of course, it is well known that comedy can contain and disguise serious ideas and issues concerning human relations, and when it does, we usually term it ‘satire’. But the so-called comedy of the ‘screwball’ style emerges not from comical characters as such, but from personalities that suddenly, or gradually, encounter people and situations which break their routine lifestyle, their social expectations and manners.
This can produce important lessons about social class, racial roles and stereotypes, personal differences in education, speech, etc. Capra’s ‘IT HAPPENNED ONE NIGHT’ is a brilliant early ‘screwball comedy’ where Claudette Colbert, as the pampered daughter of a tycoon, encounters a working-class reporter who discovers who she really is when she runs away on her own, inexperienced at independence, to escape a planned marriage to someone of her own class, and he meets her on a bus.
The film then, like others of its kind, has a serious sub-text about the erasure of class distinctions and barriers to human friendship, understanding, and compatibility. Similarly, ‘MAN ABOUT TOWN’ of 1939 — directed by Mark Sandrich who made his name directing those wonderful 1930s Fred Astaire films, many with dancing partner Ginger Rogers — like ‘TOP HAT’, ‘THE GAY DIVORCEE’, ‘CAREFREE’ and others, was the sort of film which made going to the cinema a social activity of soaring pleasure and remembered happiness.
Sandrich, in ‘MAN ABOUT TOWN’, had Jack Benny as a well-off gentleman bachelor, who fancies himself a playboy, meeting and inviting to his home all sorts of women whose coyness he is not experienced enough to detect, unlike his black butler/servant, who brilliantly pokes fun at him by preparing ordered suppers with champagne for dates who never turn up, and which the diplomatic black servant is now permitted to consume again and again.
Such comedy is far from simple-minded gags or slapstick, since they subvert class and race superiority, and reverse assumptions about the advantage of wealth over human humility and tact.

Katherine Hepburn’s roles

Cary Grant’s series of ‘screwball comedies’ like ‘BRINGING UP BABY’ and ‘HOLIDAY, both of 1938, with a specific actress like the amazing Katherine Hepburn, began to explore another angle, where the heroine is delightfully bold and eccentric, subtly passionate and sensual.
Grant, on the other hand, is always too concerned with his profession or work or everyday insecurities to pay much attention to her, and this reduces masculine aggression in his roles while re-making the woman as the person who takes the lead usually left to men, and this generates a magnetic suspense between the sexes in films of this nature.
The so-called ‘screwball comedy’ emerged at a time when American women were becoming less domestic and house-bound by entering the workforce and becoming materially independent. Such a situation has only now forcefully reached developing nations.
Caption: 
Katherine Hepburn, ‘screwball comedy’ star of the 1930s