My second post for the ongoing romantic films countdown at Wonders in the Dark is up now. At number 32, it’s Frank Capra’s seminal sexy screwball classic, It Happened One Night (1934). Night has been cited as one of the founding pictures of the screwball genre, and indeed, many of the elements that would come to define…
Peter Morgan (James Stewart) has been sent to New York City to retrieve his womanizing cousin, Keith (James Ellison), and bring him back to their small college town of Old Sharon. He finds Keith in a nightclub, but is unable to convince his love-struck cousin to come with him. However, when Peter meets the object…
There’s a brilliant bit of dialogue in the middle of Howard Hawks’ 1940 screwball masterpiece His Girl Friday that succinctly sums up the film’s derisive views on the profession of journalism. [At this point, I should probably go ahead and warn you that this post will be chock-full of spoilers.] A group of reporters have gathered…
Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) has a slight problem. Our unlikely-named heroine is a young, pretty, slightly empty-headed girl, and all the handsome young men are headed off to war. They invite her to a dance; she accepts. But her stern father, the town constable (William Demarest), forbids her to go. Undeterred, Trudy calls up her…
My latest contribution to the ongoing Wonders in the Dark Comedy Countdown is live … at number 42, it’s the frenetic and fanatically funny Preston Sturges masterpiece, The Palm Beach Story (1942)! Head on over to WitD to check out my thoughts on one of my favorite films of all time, and make sure to throw your…
“Butch,” the loyal valet of playboy shipping heir Jonathan Blair, enters his employer’s bathroom one morning, chattering away about the bright, beautiful day. He asks Jonathan what he would like to wear, only to have the shower door fly open as a shower-capped Valentine Ransome pokes her head out and asks for a bath towel.…
In the era of the Motion Picture Production Code, depictions of homosexuality were verboten, classified under the Code’s rather vague catch-all category of “sex perversion.” While those making films prior to 1934 enjoyed more freedom in their ability to depict some obvious—and even blatant—homosexual characters, the establishment of the Production Code Administration (PCA) put an…
In the mid-1930s, the screwball comedy was still a relatively new subgenre of film. Many critics label It Happened One Night, released in 1934, as the first “screwball” picture ever produced, and subsequent films such as Twentieth Century (also 1934) and Hands Across the Table (1935) built upon the elements that would become typical tropes of…
True Classics 