ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, film critics and historians have provided diverse perspectives on Hollywood’s romantic comedy. Highlights include William Paul’s fine book on Ernst Lubitsch’s sound films, James Harvey’s loving look at movies from Lubitsch to Preston Sturges, Gerald Weales’s intertextual examination of comic masterpieces, Ed Sikov’s glossy yet serious look at screwball comedy, and Elizabeth Kendall’s investigation of female stars and their directors in 1930s comedy. 1 Yet all these studies share one characteristic: they treat film comedy from the arrival of recorded sound motion pictures to World War II as an essentially discrete, self-contained entity. They accept and extend a longstanding approach to American classical film comedy by isolating two distinct, almost unrelated phases of high achievement—the slapstick work of “silent clowns” such as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd; and the screwball comedies of such directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra and Sturges. 2
