Madcap comedy code#

At this point, the conflict is established with the opposing characters and the genders, meeting for the first time. The scene introduces Susan’s character while it serves as the plot’s point of attack. This can especially be seen in the scene at the golf course. Bringing Up Baby, in particular, inverts the gender roles between its main characters David Huxley (Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (Salamensky 271). Salamensky supports that these screwball leads represent “early feminist trends” (264). In the case of Bringing Up Baby, the lead female character Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) deviates greatly from the classic Victorian role model of the dependent and submissive woman, a stereotype that inhabited not only most Hollywood films but also society at that time. Despite their light-heartedness, these comedies were often seen as an “ironic social commentary” (Salamensky 265). Tomasulo Condensed Theories) in order to suppress the fears caused by tough socio-economical conditions, at least during the screening time of the film. This supports the general theory of comedy as a pain-blocker or opium for the masses (cf. In this era especially, the exaggerated style of screwball comedies served as a “comic relief” in the form of an “escapist” entertainment for the audiences (Salamensky 263). It emerged as a sub-genre from the “sophisticated” comedies (King 56), in which the comic tone relies to a large extent on dialogue (Mast 249). The term “screwball comedy” for its genre derives from a pitched baseball, which “defies normal expectations” and, therefore, behaves unpredictably (Salamensky 265).Ĭritics and scholars applied this term retrospectively to films of the 1930s that characterized madcap characters and fast-paced talking (265).

Salamensky, and Stanley Cavell.īringing Up Baby was released in 1938 during the time of the Great Depression.

In the following analysis of specific scenes, the film’s use of the cinematic techniques of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and its opposing main characters in order to construct an equal gender image will be examined, drawing mainly on readings by scholars such as Gerald Mast, S.I. In particular, the female lead’s “screwball” actions can be read as a performance in sharp contrast to the Victorian role model of women. In particular, the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) breaks the classical gender roles and undermines male supremacy in the Hollywood conventions long before the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s. The iconoclastic quality of comedies during that time, hence, relied on a “unique aesthetic for destroying Hollywood assumptions while appearing to subscribe to them” (Mast 250). According to Jane Greene, the outcome of this suppression of, for example, explicit sexuality led to an all new genre - the “screwball comedy” (45).

Madcap comedy code#

After the imposition of the Production Code on American film productions in 1934, it appears the conservative values of gender, love and family become more consolidated in films. Film comedies, in particular, are able to deal with these conditions in an iconoclastic manner and can question or even expose “the shams of society,” because they use “the entertaining comic form” (21). Gerald Mast states that the reflection of social reality is the primary intention of commercial motion pictures (203). The arts, especially films, have always functioned as mirrors of current conditions in society. Gender in Howard Hawks’ Screwball Comedy Bringing Up Baby