When comedy ruled the screen

FOR the second year running, the American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre is celebrating the holidays with a package of zany farces from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

“Screwballs, Pratfalls & Catcalls: American Comedy Classics of the 1930s and 1940s,” which begins Thursday and continues through Jan. 1 in Hollywood, is a feast of fun with representations of every genre of comedy and work by some of the greatest directors of the era -- Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. Performers include Claudette Colbert, Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Laurel and Hardy and Jean Arthur.

The series opens Thursday with landmark comedies from writer-director Sturges: 1941’s “The Lady Eve,” with Barbara Stanwyck at her best as a cardsharp and con artist who gets her hooks into the naive ale heir “Hopsy” Pike (Henry Fonda), and 1942’s “The Palm Beach Story,” a frenetically paced romantic comedy starring Colbert as a ditzy married woman who leaves her failed architect husband (Joel McCrea) in hopes of landing a richer spouse.

Friday’s program features two of Hawks’ screwiest screwball comedies: the insanely wacky 1938 comedy “Bringing Up Baby,” with Hepburn, Grant and a leopard named Baby, and 1940’s “His Girl Friday,” a twist on “The Front Page,” with Grant as a cynical newspaper editor and Rosalind Russell as an ace reporter who is also his ex-wife.

Other movies in the series include “My Man Godfrey,” “Topper,” “Ninotchka,” “Road to Zanzibar,” “It Happened One Night,” “Harvey” and a Laurel and Hardy double bill of “Way Out West” and “Sons of the Desert.”

(The Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre in Santa Monica will also be providing holiday cheer with a program that’s a variation of last year’s at the Egyptian: “Too Much Monkey Business!: The Marx Bros. and the Three Stooges.”)

Rick Jewell, professor of film at the USC School of Cinema-Television, says there are numerous reasons why comedy was king in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“The Depression was such a miserable period in American history that people needed to go and laugh for a few hours just to get away from dark times,” he explains. “Hollywood recognized that early. When you do a content analysis from that period you’ll find there were a lot more comedy films made than any other genre.”

The talent pool included many who had gotten their starts on the vaudeville, burlesque and Broadway circuits, performers such as Bob Hope, W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers.

“I think all the best comedy talent -- actors, writers, producers and directors -- were all drawn to Hollywood in the early days of sound,” says Jewell. “Those with theatrical and vaudeville backgrounds in particular, they had a real sense of what was funny, and they were able to adapt that sense to the hard times.

“During World War II, the screwballs fade away, but you have Abbott and Costello and Hope and Crosby, and they managed to continue even though the kind of societal issues change over time. They managed to bend things to the real zeitgeist, to what the public was needing at the time.”

Some of the great comedy directors of the 1930s and ‘40s, including Leo McCarey, Hawks, Capra and George Stevens, had already learned their craft during the silent era.

“So when dialogue came along,” says Jewell, “they were able to kind of master that form of comedy and combine it with the visual comedy that they learned in the silent days. To some extent, I think that’s what is missing in comedies today. A lot of comedy filmmakers just concentrate on the funny lines and not on the potential of visual comedy.”

Editors were vastly important to the timing of these often rapid-fire funny films. “That was a real positive aspect of the studio system,” says Jewell. “You had editors who were working on these films again and again. They might be working on a ‘B’ comedy one month and then an ‘A’ comedy the next, but they really understood how comedy kicked and how to kind of space things out.

“I think in Capra’s autobiography, he mentioned he used to go to the preview with a tape recorder and tape the audience reaction to the film, and then he’d go back and, if he had to, lengthen [scenes] so people would have time to really get the laughs out of their system and wouldn’t miss the next funny moment in the film.”

Jewell says he’s always amazed at the range of the actors during this era -- “and the willingness of people who were considered kind of straight dramatic actors to take on comedy roles, like Hepburn in ‘Bringing Up Baby’ or Fredric March or Spencer Tracy and even [John] Barrymore.

“They were not just willing but also happy to have an opportunity to do comedy.”

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Screwballs, Pratfalls & Catcalls: American Comedy Classics of the 1930s and 1940s

Where: American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

When: Thursday to Jan. 1

Price: $6 to $9

Contact: 323-466-FILM or go to www.americancinematheque.com

Schedule

Thursday: “The Lady Eve,” “The Palm Beach Story,” 7:30 p.m.

Friday: “Bringing Up Baby,” “His Girl Friday,” 7:30 p.m.

Next Sunday: “My Man Godfrey,” “Twentieth Century,” 5 p.m.

Dec. 26: “Topper,” “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,” 7:30 p.m.

Dec. 27: “Ninotchka,” “Heaven Can Wait,” 7:30 p.m.

Dec. 28: “Road to Zanzibar,” “The Princess and the Pirate,” 7:30 p.m.

Dec. 29: “Harvey,” “The Devil and Miss Jones,” 7:30 p.m.

Dec. 30: “It Happened One Night,” “The Horn Blows at Midnight,” 7:30 p.m.

Jan. 1: “Way Out West,” “Sons of the Desert,” 5 p.m.