Awards

• Winner of Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2022 (United States)

Overview

A 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Love at first sight, whirlwind marriages, break-ups, divorces, remarriage… What accounts for the enduring success of the Hollywood madcap comedies of the 1930s? Directed by masters of comedy (Hawks, LaCava, Leisen, Ruggles...) and featuring the decade’s most iconic stars (Colbert, Dunne, Grant, Hepburn...), these films set romantic comedy standards for decades to come. Screwball comedy embarked on two challenging missions: to poke fun at established social norms and to undermine stereotypical depictions of gender roles, putting forward a discourse that postulated the possibility of equality between men and women. Grégoire Halbout’s reexamination of screwball comedy provides a comprehensive overview of this (sub)genre, eschewing the auteurist approach and including “minor” works never before analyzed through the screwball lens. His book explains how these screwball stories met the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for the liberalization of morals, with daring plots, verbal humor and slapstick techniques. Building on the work of Cavell, Altman and Gehring, as well as international and French scholarship, Halbout’s investigation unfolds in three parts. He first establishes a definition of Hollywood screwball comedy through a cross-sectional analysis of its socio-historical context and an in-depth examination of the genre. He then situates screwball comedy in relation to its institutional context. An exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic meant to subvert the prohibitions of the 1934 Hollywood Production Code through a verbal and visual rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre’s placement of romantic intimacy at the center of the public sphere and the democratic debate, confirming that screwball eccentricity upholds America’s founding values: freedom of speech, free consent, and contractual engagement.

Full Product Details

Author:   Grégoire Halbout (University of Tours, France)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic USA
Dimensions:   Width: 17.80cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 25.40cm
Weight:   0.454kg
ISBN:  

9781501389313

ISBN 10:   1501389319
Pages:   352
Publication Date:   23 February 2023
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction Being happy Line of descent: from remarriage comedy to screwball film Deploying a new approach to an indeterminate and unstable genre A social and political reading of a typically American genre Part One – The screwball expression: a genre shows its credentials Preamble: the fertility of Hollywood comedy in the 1930s Chapter One: Proof of identity The origins of the genre 1934, a pivotal year The “Americanization” of fictional sources A matter of language The etymology and the improbable “trajectory” of the term screwball Genre signaling in film discourse and movie reviews Chapter Two: Protagonists: the artisans of screwball comedy The directors at the helm The reign of the jack of all trades The director and the “screwballization” of scripts The actors, stars of the genre American actors for American stories The stars, genre reference points Screwball timbres and tones The importance of the background: recurring secondary characters Chapter Three: Narrative tropes and genre categories Preliminary decryption Narrative structures: “New Love”, “Old Love” and fornication forestalled Plot types, a descriptive catalogue A first attempt at a delineation of narrative tropes Conditions precedent: zeroing in on the couple The masquerade and the faces of conflict The ordeal of alterity Crises of identity “Cocktails” and genre mixing The impact of current events Tones and subjects: a repetitive and polymorphic genre A generation fades away Shifting centers of interest and changing expectations Part Two – Screwball discourse: interdiction and indirection Chapter One: A socio-economic context conducive to censorship Hollywood and the consequences of the 1929 financial crisis New audiences, new censors Popular art and popular culture: the ideological straightjacket Men of circumstance take control The censors’ mission and their ideological apparatus An improbable coincidence Chapter Two: Expressions: Screwball comedy and the forms of censorship The objective signs A lengthy, comprehensive and conflictual approval process The imprint of censorship on the Hollywood work process Forms of regulation: rhetoric and frames of reference Phraseology of the PCA How the Hays Office intervened Efforts towards an evolving methodology and judicial policy What analytical tools for which interpretation? The “Charter”, jurisprudence and the reinforcement of prohibitions Chapter Three: Content: Ideological scrubbing Creation under supervision: a system of prohibitions Purified language to fit the needs of Hollywood’s social project Forbidden images: bodies and behavior The Code, protecting institutions from the screwball menace Echo and mirror: the press’s final seal of approval Chapter Four: Indirect discourse: The invention of the screwball style Procedural Delinquency The boomerang effect: censorship becomes fodder for comedy The screenplay for Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, a model of narrative expurgation and lexical attrition The rule-breakers’ arsenal: words and images Wordplay: the ruses and pleasures of screwball language Gags and the advent of disorder The symbolic function of objects From one image to another: the metaphorization of forbidden gestures An unexpected mirror: the amplifying effect of marketing “Screwball Comedy, Sex Comedies” Part Three – The screwball celebration and the democratic discussion Chapter One: The screwball New Deal and the society of mutual consent The discourse on marriage in 1930s America A consumer society in a civilization of leisure America’s marriage debate “Advice” comes to the rescue of marriage Questioning marriage The failure of authority figures Screwball outlaws and their special arrangements The revolution of modern marriage Chapter Two: The tension of the screwball celebration; preserving the democratic space The persistence of the established order Paternal consent and the wife’s return to domesticity The missions of the screwball couple Negotiation between private and public space Escape from society Invasion and living together Conclusion The romantic relationship, a reinterpretation of the democratic bond Appendices Filmography Bibliography Index

Reviews

Synthesizing major strands of French and English-language scholarship on the theatrical and cinematic traditions of romantic comedy, Gregoire Halbout's Hollywood Screwball Comedy,1934-1945 offers a fresh and lively reappraisal of Hollywood screwball comedies as a distinctly American film genre. The scope of his approach alone is impressive. Adroitly side-stepping the pitfalls of genre studies that are limited to the inspection of a handful of celebrated films, Halbout identifies and explores an expansive corpus, one with permeable boundaries and in flux throughout the years bridging the Great Depression and the Second World War. With exactness, he also dives deeply into the records of Production Code Administration to demonstrate how evolving censorship practices in Hollywood triggered the emergence of new visual and verbal comic styles. He charts a cultural discourse crisscrossed with contradictory and conflicting voices, echoing public debates about sex, intimacy, and marriage at a time when a democratic mythos was under great strain. Brought to light in these pages are the institutional practices and creative responses through which the dialects and effects of 'screwball' surfaced and flourished on and beyond the screen. --Charles Wolfe, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Initiated and propelled by the writing of Stanley Cavell, Gregoire Halbout offers here a capacious yet discerning analysis of the remarkably fecund genre known by the disarming, perhaps misleading name screwball. Delighting in the glories of taking democratic entertainment seriously, Halbout treats readers to a lively taxonomy of the characteristics and criteria that make these films recognizable, including savvy assessments of the many directors who artfully troped love and sex into conversation-thereby eliding with comic flair the chaste restrictions of the Hays Code. Moreover, despite the madcap and zany attributes of these plots and their characters, pursuits of happiness-in their many incarnations-remain of immanent concern for one and all, on screen and off. In Halbout's company, we contend with the exigencies of marriage; the charged private and public spaces of intimacy and power; and the vexed romance of democracy. To these ends, Halbout seizes upon the narrative traits that keep these indelible films fresh, while encouraging us to ponder how and why they proliferated. Though readers familiar with Cavell's contributions will recognize his films in the line-up, they will also encounter an expanse of additional works that thrill-placing the achievements of the marquee instances in dialogue with the lesser known. Befitting his signal inspiration, Halbout sustains Cavell's influential investigation and extends it in dynamic ways, delivering in this volume what amounts to a now-indispensable companion for exploring the moral and aesthetic incitements of the genre-especially among its hilarious and profound exemplars. --David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA and editor of The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema and Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind

The book is smartly written and deeply researched, and it joins foundational work by such scholars of the genre as Stanley Cavell, Kathrina Glitre, and Wes Gehring ... This indispensable book will be valuable for those interested in screwball comedies or Hollywood history. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. * CHOICE * Synthesizing major strands of French and English-language scholarship on the theatrical and cinematic traditions of romantic comedy, Gregoire Halbout's Hollywood Screwball Comedy,1934-1945 offers a fresh and lively reappraisal of Hollywood screwball comedies as a distinctly American film genre. The scope of his approach alone is impressive. Adroitly side-stepping the pitfalls of genre studies that are limited to the inspection of a handful of celebrated films, Halbout identifies and explores an expansive corpus, one with permeable boundaries and in flux throughout the years bridging the Great Depression and the Second World War. With exactness, he also dives deeply into the records of Production Code Administration to demonstrate how evolving censorship practices in Hollywood triggered the emergence of new visual and verbal comic styles. He charts a cultural discourse crisscrossed with contradictory and conflicting voices, echoing public debates about sex, intimacy, and marriage at a time when a democratic mythos was under great strain. Brought to light in these pages are the institutional practices and creative responses through which the dialects and effects of 'screwball' surfaced and flourished on and beyond the screen. * Charles Wolfe, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA * Initiated and propelled by the writing of Stanley Cavell, Gregoire Halbout offers here a capacious yet discerning analysis of the remarkably fecund genre known by the disarming, perhaps misleading name screwball. Delighting in the glories of taking democratic entertainment seriously, Halbout treats readers to a lively taxonomy of the characteristics and criteria that make these films recognizable, including savvy assessments of the many directors who artfully troped love and sex into conversation-thereby eliding with comic flair the chaste restrictions of the Hays Code. Moreover, despite the madcap and zany attributes of these plots and their characters, pursuits of happiness-in their many incarnations-remain of immanent concern for one and all, on screen and off. In Halbout's company, we contend with the exigencies of marriage; the charged private and public spaces of intimacy and power; and the vexed romance of democracy. To these ends, Halbout seizes upon the narrative traits that keep these indelible films fresh, while encouraging us to ponder how and why they proliferated. Though readers familiar with Cavell's contributions will recognize his films in the line-up, they will also encounter an expanse of additional works that thrill-placing the achievements of the marquee instances in dialogue with the lesser known. Befitting his signal inspiration, Halbout sustains Cavell's influential investigation and extends it in dynamic ways, delivering in this volume what amounts to a now-indispensable companion for exploring the moral and aesthetic incitements of the genre-especially among its hilarious and profound exemplars. * David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA and editor of The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema and Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind *

Synthesizing major strands of French and English-language scholarship on the theatrical and cinematic traditions of romantic comedy, Gregoire Halbout's Hollywood Screwball Comedy,1934-1945 offers a fresh and lively reappraisal of Hollywood screwball comedies as a distinctly American film genre. The scope of his approach alone is impressive. Adroitly side-stepping the pitfalls of genre studies that are limited to the inspection of a handful of celebrated films, Halbout identifies and explores an expansive corpus, one with permeable boundaries and in flux throughout the years bridging the Great Depression and the Second World War. With exactness, he also dives deeply into the records of Production Code Administration to demonstrate how evolving censorship practices in Hollywood triggered the emergence of new visual and verbal comic styles. He charts a cultural discourse crisscrossed with contradictory and conflicting voices, echoing public debates about sex, intimacy, and marriage at a time when a democratic mythos was under great strain. Brought to light in these pages are the institutional practices and creative responses through which the dialects and effects of 'screwball' surfaced and flourished on and beyond the screen. * Charles Wolfe, Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA * Initiated and propelled by the writing of Stanley Cavell, Gregoire Halbout offers here a capacious yet discerning analysis of the remarkably fecund genre known by the disarming, perhaps misleading name screwball. Delighting in the glories of taking democratic entertainment seriously, Halbout treats readers to a lively taxonomy of the characteristics and criteria that make these films recognizable, including savvy assessments of the many directors who artfully troped love and sex into conversation-thereby eliding with comic flair the chaste restrictions of the Hays Code. Moreover, despite the madcap and zany attributes of these plots and their characters, pursuits of happiness-in their many incarnations-remain of immanent concern for one and all, on screen and off. In Halbout's company, we contend with the exigencies of marriage; the charged private and public spaces of intimacy and power; and the vexed romance of democracy. To these ends, Halbout seizes upon the narrative traits that keep these indelible films fresh, while encouraging us to ponder how and why they proliferated. Though readers familiar with Cavell's contributions will recognize his films in the line-up, they will also encounter an expanse of additional works that thrill-placing the achievements of the marquee instances in dialogue with the lesser known. Befitting his signal inspiration, Halbout sustains Cavell's influential investigation and extends it in dynamic ways, delivering in this volume what amounts to a now-indispensable companion for exploring the moral and aesthetic incitements of the genre-especially among its hilarious and profound exemplars. * David LaRocca, Cornell University, USA and editor of The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema and Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind *

Author Information

Grégoire Halbout is Associate Professor of English and Cinema at the University of Tours, France. He writes in French and English about Hollywood comedy and the social function of cultural industries, as well as gender and sexuality in contemporary film and television.

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