Film Studies 241 - GENRE/PERIOD: SCREWBALL COMEDY

Topics course. Classic screwball comedies were produced in a 10-year period from Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) to Sturge's Miracle at Morgan's Creek (1944). The class screens 20 films from these years, although it will include a few later films. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), Mann's Lover Come Back (1961) and the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty (2003). We 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.