Film Studies 241 - GENRE/PERIOD

Topics course. Classic screwball comedies were produced in a ten-year period, from Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) to Sturges's Miracle at Morgan's Creek (1944). The class will screen 20 films from these years, although it will include a few later films: Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), Mann's Lover Come Back (1962), and the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty (2003). We will examine the genre in its historical context and examine elements of the system -- studios, writers, producers, clothes and set designers, actors -- that produced this astonishingly witty and short-lived film genre. (E)

Topic: Screwball Comedy.