Abstract
There are two well-known groups of films which show the restrained style of the mid-thirties in its classic form — the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals (particularly Top Hat, Swing Time, Follow the Fleet and Shall We Dance) and the screwball comedies. The former group were all\made at the same studio (RKO), produced by the same person (Pandro S. Berman) and employed the same cinematographer (David Abel) so their unity of style is not surprising. The latter group, however, covers a wide range of studios, directors and cinematographers, and so one of the best-known of the screwball comedies — The Awful Truth — is a more useful illustration of this style.
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Notes
G. Weales, Canned Goods as Caviar (London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 140.
M. Thorp, America at the Movies (New York: Arno Press, 1970), p. 8.
A. Bergman, We’re in the Money (London: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 132.
K. Reader, The Cinema: a History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), p. 84.
S. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (London: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 1.
D. Byrge and R. M. Miller, The Screwball Comedy Films (London: St James Press, 1991), p. 4.
W. Gehring, Screwball Comedy (London: Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 4–6.
A. Britton, Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire (Newcastle: Tyneside Cinema, 1983), p. 9.
L. Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), p. 535.
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© 1994 Mike Cormack
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Cormack, M. (1994). Screwball Restraint: The Awful Truth. In: Ideology and Cinematography in Hollywood, 1930–39. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11858-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11858-8_7
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