Carole Lombard: The Divine Screwball at Facets Film School

Steve Reginald (Classic Movie Man) will be teaching "Carole Lombard: The Divine Screwball" at Facets Film School next month. The class will be a continuation of sorts to his last class at Facets: "The Screwball Comedy and the Feminine Mystique."

Where the other class looked at the screwball comedy careers of Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, and Katherine Hepburn, this class focuses on Lombard and her unique contribution to the genre specifically and to film comedy in general.

The class will be held on Tuesdays, February 23-March 30, 7-10 p.m.

The roots of screwball comedy

The origins of screwball comedy started almost as surely as the first motion picture cameras began to roll. Depending on which film critic/historian you believe, the definition may vary, but there seems to be some agreement on some of its characteristics.

According to author/professor Wes D. Gehring, there is a distinct difference between screwball and romantic comedy. In screwball comedy, the emphasis is on the comedy not the romance, although there is often always romance involved. Accordingly, the romantic comedy emphasizes, what else? romance.

These distinctions may seem like splitting hairs to some, but most, I think, can notice the differences between a romantic comedy like The Philadelphia Story and a screwball comedy like My Man Godfrey, for example. There is obviously comedy in the former, but the romance or romantic entanglements of Tracey Lord is where the focus lies. In the latter, there is obviously romance, but it is the comedic actions of Irene Bullock and family, in particular, that is the primary focus.

Where the label “screwball comedy” came from seems to be in dispute. Some say the labeling of the genre coincided with the release and early reviews of the film My Man Godfrey. Supposedly, a New York critic said Miss Lombard plays a real screwball and thus the labeling began. Surely there were films before Godfrey that qualified as screwball comedies, going all the way back to the silent film days, as already stated. When the genre was identified and codified is another mystery altogether.

According to Maria DiBattista in Fast Talking Dames, the screwball comedy took shape in the early thirties right after the Production Code was introduced. The new self-censorship that Hollywood imposed on itself created a new type of sex comedy, if you will. Sex comedies without sex, but filled with sharp, rapid-fire dialogue that was loaded with innuendo and double entendres. The veiled “sex talk” may have gone over the heads of the censor boards, but not over those of the audience, which were delighted by fast-talking dames like Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwyck, and Carole Lombard.

Whatever the origins, the genre has delighted audiences for generations and produced some of the most enduring films of all time.

The screwball comedy and the feminine mystique at Facets Film School

The creator of the“Classic Movie Man” blog (Steve Reginald) will teach a class entitled “The Screwball Comedy and the Feminine Mystique” at Facets Film School at 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. Chicago, IL. The six-week course will be held on consecutive Wednesdays starting October 7 from 7-9 p.m.


With the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code in 1934, movie studios were restricted in their depicting of certain “unacceptable” activities on screen. Prior to the code, the studios produced a string of provocative films that, for the time, were quite sexually explicit. 

Once the self-censorship began, the major studios had to come up with clever ways to entertain audiences without going outside the boundaries of the code. Out of these new constraints came the screwball comedy. The use of snappy dialogue filled with double entendres substituted for more straightforward “sex talk,” with the female lead becoming the dominant sex talker if you will. Professor and film historian, Maria DiBattista calls these women “fast-talking dames.”  


This fast-talking by the female protagonist is used not only to get laughs, which it most certainly does, but also to transform the male into a new man of her own creation. This reverse Pygmalion scenario, as noted by DiBattista and others, is at the heart of the screwball comedy and places women in the primary role. This genre produced many of the our most noted and familiar female screen icons, including Irene Dunne, Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck. This class will examine the screwball comedy, in the context of the female protagonist and her very important place in the canon of American cinema.


Films screened and discussed:
My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936); Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938); Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939); His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940); My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940); and The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941).