Debating the Merits of the Modern Sex Farce

I can’t remember the last time I read an article like Patrick Goldstein’s column on sex farce in film (“Demise of Sex Farce: The Mystery Is Gone,” May 8). But I do remember the first. It was in the ‘70s, but the article itself was from the ‘20s, an old, musty periodical that said the “Anything Goes” lifestyle of Jazz Age youth had killed romance and sex because “the mystery is gone.” The mystery must have come back, because now we’re hearing it’s gone again.

Every good sex film, from Preston Sturges to the Farrelly brothers, has worked because they understood that the most painful and relatable sexual tension comes not just from wanting sex, but from wanting it with a particular person.

Most modern sex film characters can have all the sex they want. But they can’t have who they want. Or they can have who they want, but only if they give up something else. Or they don’t know who they want, even if that person is right in front of them. Men and women in sex films--and in life--are usually their own worst enemies.

Today’s sex comedy heroes and heroines are as repressed as the ones in classic screwball comedies. They’re just romantically repressed. As fodder for good comedy, that works fine.

BOB UNDERWOOD

Los Angeles

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What these kind of modern movies lack is not just mystery, sexual farce, wit and the light touch but chic and sophistication, elegance and style. The ‘30s movies (and parts of ‘40s movies) provided us with the most dazzling movie sets, the most glamorous clothes and the other lost art: sexual innuendo.

Henry Fonda putting on Barbara Stanwyck’s sandal is certainly more sexual and amusing than badly dressed Warren Beatty with his pants down. As a rule: Jogging shoes, casual wear, little hats and insufferable giggling and shrieking done by unrefined women are plain wrong, in life and in the movies.

Fact is, without faces like Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, you will never again achieve what should be the premier assignment of movies: getting lost in the magic and the mystery of the screen.

SABINE REICHEL

Hollywood

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Current comedies lack the playfulness and the wonderfully humorous situations, with many of them featuring Cary Grant’s irreplaceable sophistication and charm. All that laughter without one filthy word . . . and the profanity was never missed! Luckily, there is Turner Classic Movies and also American Movie Classics . . . where comedy and sex is alive and well and a pleasure to view.

Believe it or not, older people, can, and do, have sex until into their 80s and 90s, so it shouldn’t be so painful to watch some 50-year-olds on the silver screen, if the plot and story work. Also, whenever a great comedy is remade, it is usually a total disappointment because of the addition of exploding cars, murder, mayhem and profanity--none of which is ever funny.

JANET SALTER

Beverly Hills

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There is one place where a relatively sophisticated sex farce is still appreciated: “Frasier,” on NBC.

They consistently use the restraints of network television to enhance the comedy, playing with sophistication and wit without overstepping boundaries similar to the farces from the 1930s. There are always unlikable characters, often the leads in fact, and everything is hinted at and referenced to in oblique ways, never directly, except when it plays for the greatest comic effect. There is splendid physical comedy, but not slapstick or bodily fluid humor.

It is, ultimately, an oasis of intelligence and sophistication compared to the rest of the sitcoms on television, and a weekly reminder of how good classic movies and Broadway used to be and still are, if only at revival houses and on DVD restorations.

DOUGLAS W. GIBSON

Overland Park, Kan.

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As a late-40s female, I, along with many of my colleagues, am tired of the puer/puella characters of sex-starved middle-agers. Where is the wisdom of the senex? Where is the guidance and mentoring of the crone? For characters in these roles, sex would not be a narcissistic stroking, it would signal a deepening relationality between two people--the sort of intimacy and connectedness that inspires fear in modern culture.

Stars of the ‘80s have a chance to strut their maturity and experience; too bad Hollywood doesn’t give them a vehicle for that expression.

MAUREEN MERCURY

Agoura

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I was surprised to see a man of Goldstein’s letters succumbing to the illiterati’s mangling of an age-old adage. He wrote, “When it comes to sex, it isn’t really all that funny if you can have your cake and eat it too.”

Anyone versed in the American form should know that this adage would be correctly used thusly: “if you can eat your cake and have it.” Obviously, it’s no great trick to have one’s cake and then eat it; the trick is to eat one’s cake and then still have it.

ANGELO S. LAIACONA

Los Angeles

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Re “Pop Culture’s Males Falling Hard for the Clumsily Cute” (by Julia Keller, May 7):

This article would only make sense if you skipped the years from 1930 to 2001. Keller, in bemoaning the “wacky” factor in today’s movies and television, seems to have either forgotten or never knew an extremely important part of our film history: the screwball comedy. Has she seen Carole Lombard (the queen of screwball) with William Powell in “My Man Godfrey,” Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night,” Jean Harlow in “Dinner at Eight,” Doris Day and Cary Grant in “That Touch of Mink”?

If she is unfamiliar with these films where the women are the screwball heroines with the males as their straight men, she is missing something very special. So now Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller can be the screwballs but Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock can’t? What a shame to deny women their right to be screwballs again.

LISA ERICSSON

Hollywood