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James Clive Matthews is the author of two books of film criticism, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement and blog editor for the BBC's Pocket Films site. Here he picks five romantic comedy films every home should have. Click to view Top 5 Best Romantic Comedies.
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Best Classic (Bringing Up Baby) |
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 By the late 1930s, the new sound technology had been pretty much perfected, and Hollywood was getting to grips with the potential for a new kind of fast-talking, dialogue-heavy movie. The genre that made the best use of this was screwball comedy – and Bringing Up Baby remains its epitome. |
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Screwball was a remarkable shift from the old-style slapstick stylings of the comic geniuses of the silent era – the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. Rather than relying entirely on pratfalls and silly setups – though these still played a part – screwball was instead a shift towards the kind of witty farces that had been popular on the stage since the days of Oscar Wilde, which cinema had as yet been unable to reproduce. Fast-paced and blending smart, funny dialogue with equally silly situations, the genre was the stand-out film innovation of the late 1930s, a period often referred to as the Hollywood Golden Age.
Most screwball comedies relied, first and foremost, on the set-up – the sillier the better. And you don’t get much sillier than Cary Grant’s straight-laced palaeontologist getting reluctantly caught up with Katherine Hepburn’s almost certifiably loopy socialite in the hunt for a lost bone, a leopard and a million dollars – and all in time for him to get back to his highly-strung fiancé for his impending wedding.
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 So rapid-fire is the humour that there’s practically no way you’ll catch all the dialogue on the first viewing – with Grant and Hepburn constantly talking over one another, the tightly-scripted witticisms play out like a master comedian in fast-forward. Although the machine-gun delivery of perfectly-scripted humour had been a feature of screwball ever since the genre first appeared with 1934’s It Happened One Night, this was altogether something else. For cinema audiences used to the more sedate pace of early 1930s movies, which almost patronisingly allowed them to keep up, this was an altogether new experience.
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Masterly Timing |
| And then, of course, there was the sheer insanity of the farce itself. From confusion on the golf course to torn dresses, mistaken identity to chaos in a police station, collapsing dinosaurs to madcap chases through darkened woods, keeping track of events is a breathtaking affair, kept in check through the masterly timing of the two leads and the sure guiding hand of director Howard Hawks. |
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 But at the heart of the convoluted story is the growing unlikely romance between the two leads, based around the simple theory that “the love impulse in men frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict”. In what has been a classic technique of the romantic comedy genre since at least the days of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, Grant initially despairs of Hepburn’s scattiness and can think of nothing he would like more than for her to be out of his life for good. But love is blind, irrational and – in Hollywood at least – frequently inevitable. Much like an escaped leopard, in fact – you never know when it might pop up. |
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