Bright Wall/Dark Room October 2024: All Hail the Screwball Queen by Olympia Kiriakou

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the October 2024 issue of the online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room.

Their theme for October is Screwballs, and they’re devoting the entire month to screwball comedies, past and present. In addition to Olympia’s piece on Lombard, the issue also features new essays on “The Thin Man,” “The Palm Beach Story,” “The Awful Truth,” “Mistress America,” “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “At Long Last Love,” and more.

You can read our previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or look at their most recent essays, click here.

Carole Lombard’s first appearance in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) is as electric as a lightning bolt. Her character, the dizzy socialite Irene Bullock, bounds out of a taxi at a New York City dump, where she and her sister, Cornelia, have arrived in search of a “forgotten man” for their scavenger hunt. They soon spot the titular Godfrey Smith amidst the rubble and dirt, and they offer him a job as their family butler. Irene is comically out of place in this milieu: she’s dressed in a shimmering gown and matching cape covered in gold sequins, which catch the moonlight in such a way that she practically glistens. But it’s her inexhaustible energy that really makes an impression. She shrieks at Cornelia and her stuffy boyfriend, George, that she knew about the dump first—by Irene’s logic, she should have “first dibs” on their human prize—and within seconds, she darts out of the frame. Lombard is on screen for no more than five seconds, and she moves about with such vigor that the camera can barely focus on her body. That fleeting shot has stayed with me since I first watched My Man Godfrey nearly two decades ago as the quintessential example of Lombard’s breathless screwball style.

The classical screwball comedy, set against the precarity of the Great Depression, tackles the rising anxiety of a world on the brink of war. The rich are the target of screwball’s incisive humor, and are often portrayed as cartoonish idiots with little regard for the common man. At the same time, screwball films are what philosopher Stanley Cavell calls “fairy tales for the Depression,” and offer us rudimentary solutions to complex socio-economic problems. My Man Godfrey fits Cavell’s bill; the film sets up a scathing class commentary that quickly loses its bite when it’s later revealed that Godfrey comes from a wealthy family much like the Bullocks, and that he only left his cushy life because of heartbreak. Godfrey’s mantra is “the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job,” so he invests his butler’s wages and some of the Bullock fortune into a nightclub on the site of the dump, which offers employment and lodging to his fellow forgotten men. Private capital solves a public crisis, and Godfrey becomes the champion of the downtrodden. He also saves the Bullocks from financial ruin and social disgrace after it’s discovered that the family patriarch has embezzled stockholder money to cover his personal losses. As I’ve argued elsewhere, My Man Godfrey’s neoliberal politics depict a society “without substantial upward mobility” or systemic change. Much like a fairy tale, a happy ending is within reach.

Universal Pictures had initially wanted to cast Constance Bennett or Miriam Hopkins as Irene, but they were persuaded by leading man William Powell to hire Lombard instead. Powell’s hunch paid off. Irene is a pest with adolescent tendencies—she flirts shamelessly and throws tantrums when things don’t go her way—and in another actress’s hands, she might have been a one-dimensional character. But Lombard’s earthy and sensual aura is humanizing, and she gives Irene depth that makes even her most annoying habits seem endearing. Lombard’s performance made such a cultural impression that the genre was subsequently named in her honor. When screwball films first gained popularity in the mid-1930s, they were often described as “crazy” or “outlandish” romantic comedies. Film taxonomy initially did not initially account for these high-energy variants, but classical Hollywood era critics and audiences alike implicitly understood that they looked and sounded different than those that came before them. It wasn’t until an anonymous Variety critic’s review of Lombard’s performance that the term “screwball” took hold in our collective cinema language: “Lombard has played screwball dames before, but none so screwy as this one.” Screwball’s etymology comes from baseball, and describes a pitch that moves in the opposite direction of a curve. The screwball pitch defies expectations, and as the anointed “Queen” of screwball comedy, so too did Carole Lombard. 

In addition to inspiring the genre’s name, Lombard can also lay claim to shaping the classical-era screwball heroine. Like Irene, Lombard’s screwball dames are boisterous, playful, and crackling with nervous energy barely concealed by her glamor and ethereal beauty. Physical comedy was Lombard’s career-defining idiosyncrasy; it was a skill that she learned in the late 1920s while dodging custard pies for silent comedy producer Mack Sennett. That slapstick training made her the ideal candidate for screwball’s raucous sensibility. Other screwball actresses like Jean Arthur, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Barbara Stanwyck may have occasionally dabbled in physical comedy, but Lombard perfected it.

During a recent Twentieth Century (1934) rewatch, I zeroed in on a reoccurring fidget that I’ve also noticed in many of Lombard’s subsequent screwball performances, one that captures the essence of her particular physicality. Twentieth Century is a carnivalesque madhouse bursting at the seams. It follows the complicated professional and romantic entanglements of Broadway impresario Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) and his ingénue Lily (Lombard). The film opens with Lily and her cast mates in rehearsal for Oscar’s latest Antebellum melodrama. He berates her in front of the company, telling her that she’s about as graceful as “an iceman entering the house.” Oscar even draws chalk tracks across the stage for Lily to follow. We get the sense that she is slowly losing herself to her mentor; Oscar controls her by manipulating the way her body moves through her stage performance. Lombard cleverly fiddles with the material of Lily’s blouse to convey her character’s growing anxiety. As Oscar makes Lily repeat take after take, her fidgeting becomes more pronounced; she nervously wrings her wrists and brushes her hair away from her face as she waits for her cue. Oscar’s berating instruction becomes too much to bear, and Lily eventually explodes in dramatic outburst. Lombard’s voice cracks as Lily bellows, “No man living can kick me around for eight hours until I can’t see straight. I’m a human being, do you hear? A human being!” Much like the opening scene of My Man Godfrey, Lombard’s visceral energy practically electrifies the screen and unleashes a cascade of fiery passion that has been building since Lily and Oscar’s first exchange.

In a late-career interview with documentarian Hans-Christoph Blumenburg, Howard Hawks recounted a story about how he similarly coached Lombard through the making of Twentieth Century. Lombard was intimidated to play opposite a prolific stage and screen actor like Barrymore, and as Hawks told it, she was “emoting all over the place. She was trying very hard and it was just dreadful.” Hawks claims that he and Barrymore got so fed up with her lackluster performance that he decided to pull her aside and give her a pep talk. He ended it by asking, “How would you react if a man spoke to you the way Oscar does to Lily?” True to Lombard’s famous foul-mouth, she allegedly retorted, “I’d kick him in the balls.” Hawks’s pep talk was apparently just the motivation that Lombard needed to get out of her own head and give herself over to the heightened emotions of Lily and Oscar’s toxic relationship. Barrymore is the anchor of Twentieth Century, but Lombard matches his hysterics and feigned affectations to a tee.

Given Hawks’s backstory, it’s tempting to interpret Lombard’s fidgeting as a mark of her own inexperience rather than a deliberate gesture. That theory flies out the window when you consider that Lombard was already a proficient comedian in 1934, having spent two years with Sennett’s Keystone troupe. Comedy relies on the element of surprise. It’s not easy to make a rehearsed scenario look slapdash, and while Sennett’s comedy shorts were intricately choreographed, when you observe Lombard in such films as The Campus Vamp (1928), The Swim Princess (1928), or Run, Girl, Run (1928), you get the impression that she’s spontaneously reacting to characters and situations in real time. Her off-the-cuff style carried over to her screwball films and, what’s more, she makes similar fidgety gestures in such films as Hands Across the Table (1935), True Confession (1937) and the posthumously released To Be or Not to Be (1942). It’s clear, then, that Lombard’s fidget was a conscious performance choice meant to convey her characters’s bubbling personalities, which shows her innate understanding of the genre’s tonality. Lombard was always in control of herself, even when it appeared that her characters were not.

Lombard’s physical comedy skills put her in the conversation with the Hollywood greats. She was not a precision athlete in the way of Buster Keaton, nor was she nimble like Harold Lloyd. She did not possess the rascally charm of Charlie Chaplin, nor Laurel and Hardy’s cartoonish bravado. Lombard was mischievous, dynamic, and totally lacking inhibitions. She understood the mechanics of her own body, and moved with such balletic precision that her physicality still, somehow, appears improvisational. Her style is also exceptionally modern, as if she could fit right in with today’s crop of movie actors. Lombard’s confidence was her most timeless attribute, apparent in both moving and still images. One of my all-time favorite photos of Lombard was taken at her Encino ranch by famed photographer, John Engstead. She’s dressed in riding jodhpurs and a shoulder-padded white blouse as she sits by a white fence. Her legs dangle over the top picket, and she leans back with her left arm resting atop a crimson riding blanket and her right arm fanned above her head. Lombard’s sporty outfit is a visual reference to her real-life athleticism (she was an avid rider, tennis player, and skeet shooter), but it’s her commanding pose that captures the essence of her character. She occupies the space of the frame as if to declare “Look at me! I’m here!” and I think that same fearlessness comes across in her screwball physicality.

Lucille Ball once wrote that “if an actress has the slightest aversion to pie in the face or pratfalls, the camera will pick it up instantly. The audience won’t laugh; they’ll suffer in sympathy.” Ball considered Lombard a mentor and close friend, and even cited the late actress as inspiration for I Love Lucy after Lombard allegedly came to her in a dream. Like her successor, Lombard had a plucky comic instinct and was totally committed to the bit. Lombard was also not afraid to look less than glamorous if a scene required it, and her beauty often stood in visual juxtaposition to her high-intensity roughhousing. In William Wellman’s newspaper satire, Nothing Sacred (1937), Lombard spends most of the film with stringy, wet hair, wrapped in an oversized robe that conceals her athletic frame. In Fools for Scandal (1938), she sports an oversized furry white bunny mask to woo her lover. And, in what I would argue is the most striking image of Lombard’s screwball career, she appears on the promotional poster for Love Before Breakfast (1936) with a huge black eye.

Lombard’s audacious physicality is no more evident than in the aforementioned Nothing Sacred. She plays a small town girl named Hazel Flagg who pretends to be dying of radium poisoning to win a free trip to New York courtesy of The Morning Star newspaper. When the Star’s obituary reporter, Wally Cook (Fredric March) learns of Hazel’s duplicity, he advises her to feign illness to avoid humiliation in front of a cohort of prestigious European doctors that have been ordered to study her condition. Wally tells her, “We gotta raise your pulse to 160, quick! We gotta have you gasping, panting and covered with a cold sweat inside of five minutes.” He instructs Hazel to “put up her dukes” as if they were two heavyweight boxers in a ring at Madison Square Garden, which she does with great gusto. Lombard puts the weight of her entire 110 pound frame into her punches, and repeatedly swings at Wally with such ferocity that she eventually becomes disoriented. Wally doesn’t go easy on her either; he pushes Hazel into an unlit fireplace and casually throws her limp body onto her hotel bed like a rag doll. Wally’s pushback riles up Hazel into a frenzy, and before she jumps to her feet for another round she bellows “I hate you! I just hate you!” Hazel’s body is like jelly, and Wally holds her upright by the collar of her robe to let her take one final swing at him. She misses, and he ends the fight with one final decisive punch at her jaw. Upon contact, Hazel sways from the sheer intensity of his punch. Lombard exaggerates Hazel’s delirium with comedic precision; she tilts her head back with her eyes closed and she mouths something incomprehensible, almost as if she’s swearing at him under her breath. The air in the hotel room is deathly still as Wally pokes Hazel’s chest with his index finger. She is out cold, and falls backwards onto her hotel bed.

Comedy is ripe with transgressions, but in an era in which Hollywood self-censorship severely restricted what could be shown on U.S. cinema screens, filmmakers like Wellman found ways to celebrate humorous excess—almost as a form of rebellion. The late New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther lamented that Hazel and Wally’s fisticuffs would lead to “the demise of fragile femininity” in Hollywood cinema. His tongue-in-cheek review stems from contemporaneous cultural assumptions that deemed physicality a male comic’s trait, an outdated notion that still occasionally rears its head in modern scholarly works about classical Hollywood. However, I would argue that the Nothing Sacred fight is an example of screwball’s progressive (for its era) gender politics—what Kathleen Rowe Karlyn describes as female “unruliness,” which she defines as a “special kind of excess…that points to new ways of thinking about visibility as power.” March’s character orchestrates the fight, but it’s Lombard who again commands our attention; she drives the narrative action and the camera movements in a formidable display of endurance. Screwball women are often at home in male-coded spaces, like “newspaperman” Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday (1940) or amateur sleuths Nora Charles in The Thin Man series and Sally Reardon in There’s Always a Woman (1938). Hazel’s “visibility” as a combatant is itself a form of rebellion, and this and other screwball comedies celebrate unruliness as a great equalizer.

Lombard’s star persona adds a final layer to our understanding of her close association with screwball comedy. She was a progressive feminist and supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, and also went on the record to champion gender parity in the political sphere and women’s financial independence. Lombard was also a self-styled “modern Career Girl” with direct involvement in her day-to-day Hollywood business dealings; she was one of the first classical Hollywood era actors to embrace freelancing, which afforded her greater autonomy than a studio contract. Lombard and her agent, Myron Selznick, were also the first to negotiate a handsome profit participation scheme as part of a 1938 renegotiation of her existing freelance contract with Myron’s brother, David, and his company Selznick International Pictures. Historian Emily Carman notes that Lombard’s contract included a 20% cut of the distributor’s gross, provisions affording her a mandated eight-hour workday, the right to employ the costume designer of her choice, and a no loan-outs clause. As I’ve argued elsewhere, Lombard’s “shrewd business sense and collaborative relationship with producers and studios became a major component of her star persona” and, in combination with her personal politics, added verisimilitude to the independent characters that she played on screen.

         Hollywood is in the business of selling stars, and in the classical era, studio publicity departments worked in tandem with the popular press to disseminate stories about their most valuable assets. Historian Tino Balio explains that the studios crafted their stars’ personas through a rigorous trial and error process: up-and-coming actors would be tested in various genres and with different styles until they landed on one that resonated with moviegoers. The studios would then devise biographical details that perfectly aligned with the actor’s new persona, blurring the boundary between their “reel” and “real” identities. 

In Lombard’s case, she and her publicist, Russell Birdwell, penned a comprehensive biography that was distributed to the press alongside strategic fan magazine articles that stressed that she was just like her kooky screwball characters. Take, for example, the evocative titled article, “The Utterly Balmy Home Life of Carole Lombard,” which paints a detailed portrait of the actress as an eccentric who answered her phone with different accents, threw wild house parties, and kept a menage of unusual pets. Similarly, gossip columnist Gladys Hall once claimed that Lombard arrived at her studio bungalow by “executing a few spirals and curves and a leap upon her scooter-bike…” 

Such vibrant tales propose that her screwball comedy persona was “authentic,” and characters like Lily Garland, Irene Bullock, and Hazel Flagg were simply variations of Carole Lombard the private person. They also mirror the sentiment of Crowther’s review: Lombard’s boisterous off-screen personality represented an unorthodox version of modern femininity. By all accounts, Lombard was larger-than-life, but she was also smart enough to understand that screwball comedy was a popular and profitable genre, and that she could craft her own image to capitalize on existent public interest.

My favorite scene in any Lombard film comes from Hands Across The Table (1935), in which she and Fred MacMurray break down in fits of laughter after playing a telephone prank on another character. Director Mitchell Leisen told his biographer, David Chierichetti: “When they finished the take Carole and Fred collapsed on the floor…they laughed until they couldn’t laugh anymore. It wasn’t in the script, but I made sure the cameras kept turning and I used it in the picture. It is so hard to make actors laugh naturally — I wasn’t about to throw it out!” I love the scene precisely because of that spontaneous quality; it’s romantic and silly, and much like the famous church sequence in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), you become so moved by their unbridled joy that you find yourself laughing along with them. A friend once astutely described Lombard to me as the “embodiment of champagne,” and maybe that’s why she was so well-suited for screwball comedy. Her electric screen presence brought much-needed reprieve to an interminably dark and unstable period of our not-so-distant past. 

Screwball comedy indulges our silliest impulses and reminds us of the cathartic power of shared joy. It may be cliché, but at the end of Sullivan’s Travels, the titular character observes, “there’s a lot to be said for making people laugh.” And that’s what Carole Lombard did best.