I noticed that Letterboxd does not yet have a thorough list of screwball comedy films, and since it's a (difficult to define) genre that I want to get into I decided to make this one. This list is based off the book The Screwball Comedy Films: A History and Filmography, 1934-1942 by Duane Byrge and Robert Milton Miller.
From the introduction:
A screwball comedy was at heart a love story. It’s central romance was frequently instigated by an aggressive, even eccentric woman whose efforts to prod her more stodgy and conventional beau along the rocky road to the altar primed the comic mechanisms for a great deal of humor-by-embarassment. Improbable events, mistaken identities, and ominously misleading circumstantial evidence quickly compounded…
I noticed that Letterboxd does not yet have a thorough list of screwball comedy films, and since it's a (difficult to define) genre that I want to get into I decided to make this one. This list is based off the book The Screwball Comedy Films: A History and Filmography, 1934-1942 by Duane Byrge and Robert Milton Miller.
From the introduction:
A screwball comedy was at heart a love story. It’s central romance was frequently instigated by an aggressive, even eccentric woman whose efforts to prod her more stodgy and conventional beau along the rocky road to the altar primed the comic mechanisms for a great deal of humor-by-embarassment. Improbable events, mistaken identities, and ominously misleading circumstantial evidence quickly compounded upon each other, albeit by seemingly logical progression, until a frantic conclusion in which even the impending marriage gives only faint promise of providing some whit of order as antidote to the previous narrative chaos.
This book is intended as an historical menu for the feast, as well as a guide to sorting out and identifying the certifiably screwball from the much larger parade of vintage cinema comedy which surrounds it in the program schedules and on the cassette racks. Each of the following freature films described in the second section of this book has been found by the authors to qualify as sufficiently "screwy," by the standards of the era, to merit inclusion in our annotated filmography.
The films are listed chronologically.