Golden Age American comedy

From 1934 the Hays code forbade showing desire, so the writers displaced it into dialogue: people speak fast, quarrel, cut each other off, and screwball comedy is born of that constraint. A reporter and a runaway heiress share a room divided by a hanging blanket, a palaeontologist loses a leopard in Connecticut, a divorcing couple sabotage each other's engagements. Lubitsch went further still by getting laughs out of a Polish theatre company facing the nazi occupation of Warsaw.

works 5

• CinemaIt Happened One NightFrank Capra · 1934A comedy of the years of the Great Depression, it brings together on the same night bus a runaway heiress and an unemployed journalist.Cinema
• CinemaThe Awful TruthLeo McCarey · 1937The story begins with the divorce and plays out in the period the law gives the spouses before it becomes irrevocable.Cinema
• CinemaBringing Up BabyHoward Hawks · 1938Released in 1938, the film disappointed and lost money; its reputation grew with its television screenings in the 1950s, then among the critics of the following decade.Cinema
• CinemaSullivan's TravelsPreston Sturges · 1941The film follows a director of comedies who wants to film poverty and knows nothing about it.Cinema
• CinemaTo Be or Not to BeErnst Lubitsch · 1942Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, where a troupe of actors uses its craft against the occupier.Cinema