Friday, March 17 | 5 Films
They may be few and far between on our current era’s big screens, but romantic comedies have a long, rich history in Hollywood. A few have even found Oscar success, though comedy is one genre that has always tended to receive short shrift from the Academy. Five Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated films, from four distinct eras, show how the tropes of the genre have evolved over time.
While it can be problematic in film history to declare any movie the “first” of its kind, Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) is certainly the most significant, influential and acclaimed of the early romantic comedies. The surprise success of this little charmer opened the Hollywood floodgates to countless more romantic comedies—as well as screwball comedies, a related genre that leans more toward satire than romance.
Capra was the perfect director to help birth these genres because by 1934, his work had already proved that there was no director in town better able to blend comedy and drama, laughs and romance. All the same, practically everyone involved in the making of It Happened One Night resisted it. The story had been rejected by MGM before Capra read it and persuaded a dubious Harry Cohn, Columbia’s chief, to buy it for him. When Robert Riskin’s screenplay was ready, Capra approached countless leading ladies to play Ellie, the runaway heiress who battles and banters with a reporter seeking a scoop. Myrna Loy, Margaret Sullavan, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard and Constance Bennett all turned Capra down. Some were even insulted to have been asked, since Columbia was considered a low-grade—practically poverty-row—studio in those years. Capra considered dropping the project but then was able to borrow Claudette Colbert from Paramount and Clark Gable from MGM to play the leads—because Harry Cohn had agreed to pay Colbert a whopping salary and accommodate her with a quick four-week shoot, and because MGM wanted to punish Gable for insubordination. Both stars arrived on the Columbia lot unhappy to be there. Even after the film wrapped, Colbert told friends, “I just finished the worst picture in the world!”
The movie was released slowly, first in rural areas, and gradually caught on with audiences who turned it into a bona fide sleeper—a movie that seemingly comes out of nowhere to unexpected great success. Audiences loved the stars’ chemistry and sexy comedy (especially when, in a hitchhiking scene, Colbert teaches Gable that “the power of the limb is greater than the power of the thumb”) and they delighted in the concept of a spoiled heiress forced to spend time with an ordinary guy, travel in an ordinary way, and encounter regular people. The story’s devices of mistaken identity, juxtaposition of rich and poor, and reverse-class snobbery would become hallmarks of screwball comedy for at least a decade.
The picture’s enormous commercial success was matched by a jaw-dropping Oscar night when It Happened One Night became the first movie ever to win the top five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay. The feat has since been matched only by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Colbert didn’t even attend the ceremony: she was boarding a train to New York when she was informed of her win. The train was held as she rushed with a police escort to the Biltmore Hotel, posed for photos, and rushed right back to the station, Oscar in hand. It was the only Academy Award she ever won.
By the time of The Philadelphia Story (1940), Katharine Hepburn had proven her abilities in screwball and romantic comedy, with Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Holiday (1938) under her belt, both co-starring Cary Grant. Holiday, however, fine film that it is, was a notorious flop, and Hepburn was placed on an infamous exhibitors list of stars deemed to be “box-office poison.” Audiences were finding Hepburn haughty, arrogant, and off-putting onscreen. The actress promptly bought out her RKO contract and left Hollywood for two years. “I set myself a goal, and took charge of my life,” she later recalled. With Philip Barry, the author of Holiday, she developed a new play that revolved around the very issue that had caused moviegoers to retreat: their perception of Hepburn as icy and brittle. That is precisely the problem that flummoxes her character, Tracy Lord, in The Philadelphia Story, until she develops humility and shows everyone that she has a heart. The play was an enormous hit, running 417 performances on Broadway and 254 on the road. With that success in hand, Hepburn sold the movie rights to MGM on the condition that she play Tracy, George Cukor direct, and Cary Grant and James Stewart co-star. (Her original choices, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, were unavailable.)
The splendid result, released in December 1940, reinvented Hepburn’s screen persona and made her bankable again. Her screen history with Grant is referenced in the classic, wordless, opening sequence in which their marriage ends comically and he pushes her flat on her backside (something that’s a lot funnier on screen than it is on paper). It was devised at the last minute as a nod to the public’s desire to knock Hepburn down to size themselves. “Just what Tracy—and I—needed,” Hepburn later said.
Hepburn’s chemistry with her co-stars is sparkling, whether she’s sparring with Grant, antagonizing Stewart, or finding love with Stewart in the moonlight—one of the most delightful scenes of any romantic comedy. The Philadelphia Story garnered six Oscar nominations, for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actress (Hepburn), Actor (Stewart) and Supporting Actress (Ruth Hussey.) Stewart won the only competitive Oscar of his career, and Donald Ogden Stewart won for his dazzling screenplay. The Oscar loss didn’t faze Hepburn too much. As she later put it: “I understood Tracy Lord, and what made her tick. I gave her life. She gave me back my career.”
About three months after MGM’s release of The Philadelphia Story, Paramount unveiled another all-time-great romantic/screwball comedy, The Lady Eve (1941). Written and directed by Preston Sturges—and coming in the middle of an unparalleled run of seven comedy masterpieces from the filmmaker—this was a career reinvention for another actress, Barbara Stanwyck. She had done light comedy before, but when she befriended Sturges on the set of 1940’s Remember the Night, which he had written, and he told her that he was going to write a real screwball comedy specifically for her, she was shocked. A year later, The Lady Eve was in release. It has long since been recognized as one of Stanwyck’s finest films and an example of her astounding versatility across almost all genres.
She plays the title character, Jean Harrington, the “Lady Eve,” in a story of father-and-daughter con artists who try to fleece a millionaire, only for the daughter to fall in love with him. The old screwball tropes of feigned identity and class issues are out in full force, but incorporated by Sturges with his own seamless blend of sophistication and slapstick. The film is equal parts funny, romantic and sexy.
Henry Fonda, as the millionaire, was also successfully cast against type, especially considering that his recent work included Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), not exactly laugh riots. In the supporting cast, Charles Coburn as Stanwyck’s father is an utter delight, revealing his principles with the memorable refrain, “Let us be crooked but never common.” For all its brilliance, The Lady Eve managed only one Academy Award nomination, for the original story credited to Monckton Hoffe.
Eighteen years later, with Pillow Talk (1959), Rock Hudson, Doris Day and Tony Randall brought romantic comedy to a distinct new era, with the clothes, cars, colors and architecture of the late 1950s (not to mention the current vogue for split-screen visual techniques) all providing new context for yet another battle-of-the-sexes farce that incorporates disguises and feigned identity. Ironically, the screenplay was originally written some fifteen years earlier and had floated around Hollywood, unmade, until producers Martin Melcher and Ross Hunter bought it as a vehicle to rejuvenate the career of Melcher’s wife, Doris Day. She had been the top-ranked female star in Hollywood in 1952 but in recent years had been going through a slump. The thinking was that a modern sex comedy could reinvent her persona from innocent girl next door to sophisticated career woman.
Day loved modernizing her image in Pillow Talk, even down to her new hairdo and Jean Louis wardrobe. “For the first time I was wearing clothes in a picture that I felt accentuated my body and enhanced the part I was playing,” she later wrote. “The contemporary in me finally caught up with a contemporary film, and I really had a ball.” She also helped teach Rock Hudson the tricks of comic timing, since he had built his career with dramas, war movies and westerns, with next to no comedy experience. In the finished film, Hudson comes across as a natural comedy actor, perfectly relaxed and confident, in the role of a philandering songwriter who tries to seduce Day (who plays a successful interior decorator) by pretending to be a charming Texan. Even though Pillow Talk now plays quite innocently, despite its amusing sexual innuendo, it was seen differently at the time. Hudson recalled worrying that “we’d ruin our careers because the script was pretty daring stuff for 1960. The story involved nothing more than me trying to seduce Doris for eight reels.”
Pillow Talk was such a hit that Day and Hudson shot to the top of the star rankings, which they effectively ruled for the next five years. Their chemistry was so potent that they teamed for two more comedies, along with co-star Tony Randall in the role of the “other guy.” Come Oscar time, the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Actress (Day), Supporting Actress (the crowd-pleasing Thelma Ritter), Art Direction, Musical Score and Original Screenplay, which won.
In 1977, Herbert Ross directed another original screenplay, written by Neil Simon—The Goodbye Girl—which became widely beloved. Starring Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason as unwilling co-dwellers of the same Manhattan apartment, the setup is tailor-made for the look at a relationship that grows from outright hostility into warm romance, with entertaining Neil Simon one-liners abounding. Dreyfuss is a struggling actor, while Mason is a divorced mother of a young daughter, played by Quinn Cummings in a remarkable child performance.
Simon’s script actually began in a different form, and started to be filmed with Mike Nichols directing Robert De Niro. But the tone was off, and Simon realized De Niro was miscast. Production stopped, Nichols left the project, and Simon rewrote the script to be both funnier and more romantic, and the film as we know it was underway.
The film received mixed reviews, with The Washington Post declaring: “[it] represents a satisfying step back in the right direction for the purposes of light, optimistic film romance. Its appeal isn’t exactly novel, but it is ingeniously and refreshingly traditional.”
Audiences took strongly to the onscreen chemistry and the movie’s ability to make them laugh and cry, turning it into a solid hit that grossed $38 million on a $4 million budget. And the industry recognized The Goodbye Girl with five Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Actor (Richard Dreyfuss), Actress (Marsha Mason), Supporting Actress (Quinn Cummings) and Original Screenplay. The sole winner was Richard Dreyfuss, whose Oscar remains the only one of his career to date. The movie itself lost Best Picture to another classic romantic comedy: Annie Hall.
