There are none that can compete with the real stuff. The rest are parodies.
I liked One fine Day, though (1996), but maybe that was because Michelle Pfeiffer was in it. I can remember one fast scene on the boardwalk where she accuses him to suffer from peter pan complex and Clooney retorts she was suffering from Captain Hook complex. That seemed to be in the spirit of the old screwball comedies I would say.
There simply aren’t pairings like Grant/Hepburn at the moment.
Nobody else thinks that that television saps screwball of it’s necessary glamour?
I never made the case that Anderson’s films were screwball, just The Royal Tenenbaums.
It’s not a solid entry (I never said that it was), but it does trace it’s lineage back to screwball, and i think it straddles the genres of screwball and whatever it is Wes Anderson does.
Another vote for Flirting With Disaster.
I also dig a Fish Called Wanda if that qualifies. And I might include some of Francis Veber’s films (like Le Placard and Le Diner de Cons).
Down With Love. A throwback to Day-Hudson movies. Renee Z and Ewan.
Rat Race is amusing, but I do not know if it is a good movie. It reminds me of my childhood, and I will always love it for that. I’ll Have to check out The Hudsucker Proxey. I agree with @mathias. I don’t see the Royal Tenenbaums as screw ball.
What are your opinions on The Brothers Bloom? I never got a chance to see it while in theaters.
I’ve been looking for this article since this debate started, and I just found it: Wes’s World. It dismisses Anderson’s style as “art-gallery precision misapplied to screwball comedy.” While I disagree (I think it’s a good thing (I would say art-gallery precision applied to screwball comedy)), I think it is hard to disentangle The Royal Tenenbaums from the tradition of American screwball comedy. While it is not as much of a pastiche as the screwballs of Bogdanovich and the Coens (Anderson’s career, unlike many filmmakers, seems to be free of pastiche), it does seem to transplant the roots of screwball into new soil.
Whatever screwball comedy means…..can u define it?
It took this long before the magic question came up. Down With Love, a turgid film, is not a screwball comedy because Day-Hudson movies were not screwball comedies. I have no problem with calling The Royal Tenenbaums a screwball comedy. It clearly has enough elements in it to qualify and the humor in the film clearly comes from the dialogue rather than Anderson’s fussy design.
Haven’t seen Down with Love yet. And Tenenbaums lends itself more to Salinger than anything.
I don’t think because a comedy’s humor mainly comes through dialogue..necessarily makes it screwball.
Of course it doesn’t necessarily make it screwball (Woody Allen’s comedies are obviously dialogue based and wouldn’t be called screwball ) but the kind of witty ripostes, quips, and back-and-forth verbal jousting are necessary ingredients and The Royal T’s does have that. I was just responding to the criticism that Anderson’s film doesn’t qualify because it’s overly stylized.
I just don’t seen enough farce in Tenenbaums to make it a neo-screwball. It’s “quirky”, witty dialogue yes, but doesn’t really tell its story through farcical elements. For me anyway.
the entire premise of the film (a man pretending to be dying so he can move in and take advantage of his estranged family) is farcical.
again…depends on what you define as farce..as screwball..etc..
Tenebaums is done in a very non-farcical manner, though. It’s not treated in the same way a screwball would be treated. I agree with you that it certainly has those elements, and is melding a couple genres together, but it’s difficult to say it is a neo-screwball film. It would be easier to make that case for Coen brothers comedies, and/or romantic comedies than The Royal Tenebaums.
The Ladies Man
For suave insouciance, no line given to a Cary Grant character can match Leon Phelps’ classic, “Listen, I was wandering. Can I ask you a question? Uh… was your father a meat burgler? Here’s why I ask: because it looks like somebody stole two fine hams and shoved them down the back of your dress.”
Ari’s claim that “witty ripostes, quips, and back-and-forth verbal jousting are necessary ingredients” seems correct to me, as long as you add fast-paced. But I would have thought that this is precisely what The Royal Tenebaums is missing. Can anyone point to examples?
While it was considered more of an action, comedy I felt, Pineapple Express was more of a neo-screwball comedy than anything else. And I thought it was pretty funny on an absurd level.
If you look at Chaplin’s films…they have all the hallmarks of screwball comedy. Farce, physical humor, mistaken identity, the dogged pursuit of the opposite sex. But I would say witty repartee was lacking…because well…most are silent. Still very screwball though.
Casey, I think you’re off on the concepts. Chaplin isn’t screwball at all. He’s slapstick if you have to use those labels. As for The Royal T’s, I would just say that I agree that the delivery is not as lightning paced as classic screwball (the lackadaisical-ness of the delivery might make it “neo”) but I think the constant sparring between Royal and everyone else in the film would definitely qualify as examples. Sure, the Coen brothers are more perfect examples because they are actively trying to make a screwball comedy when they make films like Intolerable Cruelty (in the same way that Bogdanovich was deliberately trying to revive the genre with What’s Up Doc?) so it makes sense that they fit the classic mold better. But then they’re not really trying to do much with the genre but to riff on it.
>>I don’t think you can call The Royal Tenenbaums screwball. Some of the elements of the plot would be suited to a screwball comedy, but that’s about it. A lot of the humour is dry and deadpan (which is more or less the antithesis of screwball).<<
Perhaps that’s what makes Anderson’s films neo-screwball?
And I would place Anderson’s films in the screwball tradition; even though they’re less manic and more deadpan the details are frequently just too odd – such as the gentleman who goes hunting the cobra with a spatula in DARJEELING …
The problem with ROYAL TENENBAUMS being considered screwball is quite simple. Most screwball comedies are actually, you know, COMEDIES, that is they are actually funny. ROYAL TENENBAUMS has fewer laughs than SCHINDLER’S LIST.
but it’s “neo”. not supposed to be funny….lol
Casey, of course! A handy designation. Shall we claim ROYAL TENENBAUMS as the first Post-Comedy Neo-Screwball Comedy?
Yes! lol
The Coens makes some of the closest things we might term “screwball” but the thing is that so few of their pictures are really romances, per se, which is such a big part of the dynamic of so many screwball comedies from the 30s and 40s. What they bring, in a screwball sense, is the speed of their pictures: each is short (except No Country, but less said the better) and zinger-filled and brisk and forever forward-moving. It’s no wonder O Brother was their biggest hit: it’s a tight little package of film history and jokes and songs all whirling about George Clooney’s dry turn, the closest we have to a real star these daze. Cuz, really, it may boil down to lower wattage. However, in a more basic sense, the world is different, and we have different concerns, and movies just don’t work like they once did. Again, there’s the obvious bit that there’s never going to be another Cary Grant, nor Irene Dunne, simply because stars aren’t quite stars as such anymore. Or, the reason I like those Oceans movies is precisely because they’re trying to do a real old-Ho’wood thing with all those “icons” lined up piling on the charm. Charisma is not only underrated these days (Robert Pattinson? Jake Gyllenhaal? these are the ‘throbs?) but underutilized. And, really, where are the women? The best thing about those older screwball films is how much equality you see: Irene Dunne and Barbara Stanwyck are FORCES, and Katherine Hepburn ain’t so meek either, that I can’t imagine anybody besides Clooney and Pitt and maybe Clive Owen standing up against. The closest, maybe, is Tilda Swinton. She’s fucking amazing. And perfect—down to the collar—in something like Burn After Reading. Oh, I guess Catherine Zeta-Jones is pretty powerful, or powerfully pretty, in a classic way.
Maybe that’s it: what happened to the American actress?
Would The Birdcage be considered a neo-screwball?
I say most certainly.
I can’t imagine Pitt standing up to Irene Dunne or Barbara Stanwyck, and he’d be as obliterated by Katherine Hepburn as he was by the sublime Tilda Swinton in B. BUTTON. Clooney, maybe. I rather liked Owen in that thing he did with Julia Roberts, but she was the problem: she just never took flight somehow.
I thought Angelina Jolie managed the screwball thing very well in the good parts of MR. AND MRS. SMITH, basically obliterating Brad Pitt (come on, which major actress, or actor, hasn’t obliterated Pitt simply by showing up and actually acting?).
Another latter-day screwball — Carl Reiner’s MAN WITH TWO BRAINS, which contains Kathleen Turner’s best screen performance, as a malign maneating black widow who takes great delight in torturing Steve Martin. One of the greatest comic performances in American film, worthy of Carole Lombard. Turner did her best in the unfortunate WAR OF THE ROSES, but was undone by an inexperienced director and unfortunate costar who couldn’t match her brilliance.
Ari, slapstick is an element of farce..and an element of “classic” screwball comedy (which is based in farce).
Intolerable Cruelty, I think, is the closest the Coen’s come to pure screwball genre stuff.
Skip McCoy
I can’t even begin to see Wes Anderson as part of the screwball tradition. I think that would be such a broad application of “screwball” that the term would be essentially meaningless.
Now, the only major area that hasn’t been mentioned is television. The single greatest revival of the screwball form is Arrested Development. It’s all there: whip-fast dialogue, manic plotting, and poking fun at the idle rich. 30 Rock is essentially a screwball comedy as well.