Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934-1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals

Grgoire Halbout provides a comprehensive overview of the screwball comedy film subgenre, giving it its rightful place among genres, eschewing the auteurist approach and including many "minor" works never before analyzed through the screwball genre lens. His book seeks to explain how these romantic comedies responded to the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for a liberation of morals with extravagant plotlines, verbal humor, and a deployment of slapstick techniques gleaned from the silent era.

It unfolds over three reflections, opening with a cross-sectional perspective on the history and definition of Hollywood Screwball comedy relative to other forms of classical Hollywood comedy. Building on the work of Cavell, Altman, and Gehring, Halbout analyzes the socio-historical context, the etymology of the term screwball, the reflexivity of filmic discourse, and the major narrative structures of the genre. He then moves on to examine the influence of internal Hollywood self-regulation on the genre via the Production Code of 1934. This exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic by analyzing the range of prohibitions and the means of subverting them: a specific verbal and visual aesthetic relying on a rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre, convoking politics, the screwball couple, intimacy and the public sphere. This romantic and conjugal discourse strives to reaffirm America's founding values: freedom of expression, free consent and contractual engagement.

Adapted from the French, this work provides access to international and French scholarship on this area of classical Hollywood film.