The Screwball

Two hot new advice posts over at http://urbanhonking.com/advice/. One is by a guest writer! Fun!

Well, the school year has begun. My classes are fun, filled with smartypantses, just like last year. So many smartypantses at this school! I’m being ruined for other schools, I know it. What greater joy can there be than teaching smart kids about stuff you’re interested in? What a delight. Writing on the board and yelling about Plato. Office hours scheduled on Google calendar. We live in the future.

Today we are trying to figure out how to live on $500 less a month than we had last year (I got a raise but his funding ran out). It doesn’t seem feasible and yet it must happen. The old man is dealing with our online budget thing and stressing me out yelling across the house to ask me what certain purchases were. I feel like I should stop seeing my massage healer lady but then what will happen to my body? Also, no more dinners out, which is sad, so sad, alas. Is there a way a busy professor can pick up an extra five hundo a month? Seriously, things are dire. It seems like such a relatively small amount but I can’t think of anything. Keep me posted on that.

Ugh.

Going to try not to spill wine on this bridesmaid dress so I can sell it when the wedding’s over. Also going to sell my wedding dress. What else could I sell? Nobody even wants my eggs anymore! WOE

Anyway, the cry of the broke asshole, nothing new.

Last night we watched The Awful Truth, which is a Cary Grant/Irene Dunn screwball comedy from I think 1938. We are slowly working through all the screwball comedies, because they are amazing and the gender stuff is fascinating and often surprising. The only one I have not liked so far is Bringing Up Baby (“the one with the leopard”). The screwball comedy is a delightful genre. Ferociously clever men and women verbally sparring at top speed. His Girl Friday, with Rosalind Russell! How do you even talk that fast. And usually they’re not sexist in the way you’re expecting. Like in Woman of the Year, with Tracy and Hepburn (“whaddya say, ya old poop?” “oh god he’s hepburn”), where she’s this super fancy journalist lauded the world over and he’s this schlubby sportswriter and for a long time you think the message is going to be that she has to give up her career to save her marriage, but instead the film climaxes with this amazing scene where she tries to cook him breakfast and fails so spectacularly, like she doesn’t even know how a toaster works, and the coffee explodes all over the kitchen, and she’s embarrassed, but then Tracy is basically like “I don’t want you to cook me breakfast or quit your job, I just want you to be nice to me and maybe hang out with me sometimes instead of constantly going to galas,” and then they are happy. He says something like “I don’t want you to be Katharine Hepburn OR Little Mrs. Tracy, but can’t you be Katharine Hepburn Tracy?” Kind of an amazing sentiment, in 1942.

Maybe my favorite is Trouble in Paradise, about two master con-men who fall in love while trying to con each other. Then they go on to a delightful life of conning, together! Things get sticky when they embark on a long-con involving the dude pretending to fall in love with a rich independent single lady so he can rob her blind. Ooops, he really does fall in love with her! Hearts are broken but all is put right in the end. There’s some fabulous line the spurned con-man wife yells at her confused con-man husband where she’s like “Oooh I’d NEVER fall in love again, even if he was the greatest thief in the world!” Their love is based on their mutual regard for one another’s grifting skills. So many delightful hijinx.

Also of course It Happened One Night, with Clark Gable and Claudet Colbert. Oh man, you can actually feel the sparks. Not like the Cary Grant movies where the verbal sparring is immaculate but you don’t actually feel like the two people want to bone. Gable and Colbert, ugh! Sexual tension to the max. Poor Clark Gable and his big ol’ ears, so embarrassed to love a rich girl. I laugh so hard at the newspaper headline that says “ELLIE ANDREWS ESCAPES FROM FATHER.” Also of course the classic scene where her dad is walking her down the aisle to marry that random dumbass who flies in on his “gyroplane” like the Asp in Li’l Orphan Annie, and it’s like the longest walk down the aisle in history because somehow it gives her dad the time to deliver this insanely long speech about how he doesn’t want her to marry this guy, and how really he thinks she should marry that penniless weirdo who’s been skulking around saying incriminating things and yelling at him as though they were class equals, and refusing his pay-off offer, which impresses the dad enough apparently to want to make him his heir, which is perhaps a bit much to believe, but still it works, it works and you love that benevolent father so much! And then Ellie keeps walking, straight past the groom, and past the minister, and then she’s running across the field, her immensely long wedding veil flapping behind her, never to return! While the amazed wedding guests gasp! 1934 wedding fantasy!!!

But the Awful Truth is not that good. I was bummed. The gender stuff is gnarly, the verbal repartee lifeless. The only good part is a fox terrier named Mr. Smith who gets up to some serious monkey business. I love how the dog stuff is played straight. “Mr. Smith…is he who I just had thrown out for contempt?” “Yes your honor.” And how Irene Dunn says they got married so they could give Mr. Smith a better home. It just didn’t really work as a screwball, for me, though. It gets way too kooky and Irene Dunn gets way too crazed at the end. And in my opinion they have no chemistry betwixt them. But it did make me think about how much stuff you lose just because of the passage of time. Like it took me forever to get that her crazed impersonation of his sister at the end was meant to imply to his future wealthy in-laws that he was actually low-class, masquerading as high-class, thereby ruining his engagement to their daughter. For fully five minutes I was just like, why is Irene Dunn acting so fucking weird? She was doing some accent-work that just no longer resonates with us. Ohhhh, that’s a low-class accent! I get it.

The snoopy kept waking up and looking at the screen when Mr. Smith would bark. Oh snoopy, what does he say? I wonder if the snoopy can understand him even though he’s speaking old-timey dog language. Snoopy hearing the voice of such a long-dead snoopy, it’s eerie.

We also re-watched All About Eve. Jesus Christ, what a picture! I can not think of many films that are more virulently misogynist and yet how I love it. Saggy drunk Bette Davis screaming and crying and flinging her hair around! “You’re maudlin and full of self-pity….you’re MAGNIFICENT,” perhaps the greatest line in film history. Also a short but excellent turn by a young Marilyn Monroe, just zinging the hell out of all and sundry then later puking before an audition. Just a tremendous film. So exhilarating when Eve finally reveals her rotten core, in the ladies lounge! Holy shit get away from that woman!!

Not a screwball comedy, but still.

Does Some Like It Hot count as a screwball comedy? I don’t think so, since the main romantic tension is between Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. “I’m a boy…I’m a boy…I wish I were dead”

However, Tony Curtis IS doing a Cary Grant impersonation, which Lemmon mocks (“‘Nobody talks like this!'”). The tangled web we weave.

God, if anyone reading this has not seen Some Like It Hot, how do you even live with yourself. How could you wait even one minute before renting it and watching it ten times in a row. I wish I could watch it every single day. There was a brief period in middle school when I totally did. What an incredible film. Such amazing gender stuff, you won’t believe it. Dressing up as women makes them not into caricatures, but into better human beings! Like they understand, at last, a woman’s dreadful struggles. That whole part where Jack Lemmon can’t believe he got pinched in the elevator. Like he’s deeply, sincerely shocked that that kind of thing could happen. Kind of like Tootsie, but without the ultimate message that a man does a better job of being a woman than a woman does. Also easily the best final scene in cinematic history, obviously.

Unreal. Billy Wilder is truly seated at Jesus’s right hand in heaven, else there is no justice in this world.

This entry has degenerated wildly. I’m going to go work on job letters now. I said good day sir