FOR the fourth Christmas season in a row, the American Cinematheque is celebrating the holidays with a lot of jolly cheer, belly laughs and guffaws.
"Screwball Comedy Holidays!," which rings in Thursday at the Egyptian Theatre and Dec. 27 at the Aero Theatre, features some well-known farces, as well as some rarely screened gems starring comic giants such as Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Lucille Ball, the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello and W.C. Fields. The series also spotlights some of the most influential comedy directors of the 1930s-'50s including Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey, George Stevens and Preston Sturges.
Comedy was a super-genre during that era, says Rick Jewell, a professor at USC's School of Cinema and Television. "They made more comedies than any type of movie back then. And the range was extraordinary, from the kind of European-centric sophisticated comedies that Lubitsch did to the pure, unadulterated Three Stooges kind of slapstick. And then you had all these different kinds in between."
So was there a plethora of comedies because actors, writers and directors were just funnier back during that golden age?
"I think they had better writing back then and better performers," reflects Jewell. "And possibly -- this could be argued -- better directors as well. You really had an opportunity to grow and hone your craft because they did so many comedies. Some of the supporting actors were in a dozen or more comedies a year, so you were constantly working. Nowadays, they are still making comedies, of course, but somehow it's a whole different system. If you are involved in one a year you are lucky."
Jewell says the retrospective is rich in films that aren't shown much these days on television or at festivals, and some aren't out on DVD. Among the rarities in the series is the 1936 screwball comedy "Theodora Goes Wild," which marked Dunne's first foray into the genre; McCarey's 1935 classic "Ruggles of Red Gap," starring Charles Laughton as a very proper English valet who is won by a cowboy in a poker game; and Lubitsch's lovely last completed film, 1946's "Cluny Brown," starring Jennifer Jones as a plumber and Charles Boyer as the penniless Czech intellectual who loves her.
"Lubitsch could balance romance and comedy probably better or as well as any director who came along," says Jewell. "That is why [his films] work so well today."
