The screwball comedy of the 1930s imagined commoners bumping up against the wacky world of the idle rich. The laughs came from the eccentricities, the flouting of society's rules and the deserved comeuppances.
A new batch of Warner comedies has two of the best examples. Bringing Up Baby (1938) was criticized by its own director, Howard Hawks, for not having one sane character the audience could identify with. That may explain why the film fared badly at the box office -- and why Ray Milland, Ronald Colman and Robert Montgomery turned down the lead male role -- but those who stayed away missed a treat. Cary Grant is the distracted paleontologist who needs one more bone to complete his dinosaur skeleton. Katharine Hepburn is the wealthy gadabout who loses a tame leopard named Baby that responds to the song I Can't Give You Anything But Love. Meanwhile, a second, wild leopard has escaped from the zoo.
Hepburn's heiress is maddening -- on ripping Grant's jacket, she says, "Oh, you've torn your coat" -- and intoxicating. The two-disc DVD has a commentary by Peter Bogdanovich, who made his 1972 comedy What's Up, Doc in homage to this film, and repeated the ripped-clothing joke.
Jack Conway's Libeled Lady (1936) is less famous but no less of a gem, even if the DVD's picture could use some restoration. The newspaper edited by Spencer Tracy, who is scheduled to marry Jean Harlow, accuses socialite Myrna Loy of trying to steal someone else's husband. Loy sues. Tracy hires William Powell to marry Harlow and seduce Loy, thereby "proving" that Loy is a husband-stealer and quashing her libel suit. We know all this in the first few minutes. To appreciate how much incident is packed into this film, consider that the idea behind one sequence -- Powell pretends to be an expert angler when he has no idea how to reel in a fish -- occupied an entire movie in 1963, Man's Favorite Sport, starring Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss and coincidentally directed by Hawks. Powell and the much younger Harlow were a romantic item in life, and might have married if Harlow hadn't died of uremic poisoning in 1937.
The Philadelphia Story (1940) is less a screwball comedy than a comedy of manners, with Grant trying to talk ex-wife Hepburn out of remarrying while reporter James Stewart falls for her. The two-disc DVD includes 1942 and 1947 radio dramatizations of the movie, both with the three leads, and a full-length documentary about Hepburn's life narrated on and off screen by the star herself. One of her comments is particularly timely, given Cate Blanchett's Oscar win for playing Hepburn opposite Leonardo di Caprio's Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Hepburn had starred in The Philadelphia Story on Broadway. Hughes bought the movie rights even before the play opened and gave them to her. "Wasn't that a nice present?" she says. "Howard was no fool. He knew that every actress would want it, and was afraid that no one would want me in it." She asked for Clark Gable and Tracy, and got Grant and Stewart. Not too shabby.
Filling out the set are the enjoyable Stage Door (1937), with Hepburn and Ginger Rogers as actresses hoping for their break; and the comedy-melodrama Dinner at Eight (1933), whose best moment comes in the famous exchange between Harlow and Marie Dressler at the end. Harlow: "You know, I read a book" -- Dressler stumbles in shock -- "and it says machinery is going to take the place of every profession." Dressler: "Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about." A real disappointment is that one of the best comedies ever made, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942), will not be in the Canadian set because Warner doesn't have the Canadian rights. Expect Internet sales to be brisk.
Also out this week are the second season of Wonder Woman, half the third season of Lost in Space, the third volume of SCTV Network 90, the recent remake of Flight of the Phoenix with Dennis Quaid, and Incident at Loch Ness, a collaboration between Zak Penn and Werner Herzog that has prankish fun with the notion of stalking the Loch Ness monster. An excellent sports movie, Hoosiers (1986), stars Gene Hackman in the triumph-of-the-underdogs story of how the Milan Indians won Indiana's state high-school basketball championship in 1954. Hackman is the coach; Hoosiers is what people in Indiana call themselves. Among the extras: indistinct black-and-white footage taken from a distance of the deciding game against the Muncie Bearcats, and a commentary in which director David Anspaugh says he was riven with self-doubt throughout the filming.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
PICCADILLY
To appreciate the jerkiness of the transition from silent movies to sound, consider Piccadilly. E. A. Dupont's silent British melodrama from 1929 was beautifully shot with German expressionist touches by cameraman Werner Brandes, has an excellent new musical score by Neil Brand, and was designed by Alfred Junge, who later designed The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death. The film, black and white with yellow and blue tints, gives a short but flashy role to Cyril Ritchard, who in 1960 played Captain Hook opposite Mary Martin in TV's Peter Pan. It marks the first feature-film appearance of Charles Laughton, as a drunken diner at London's Piccadilly nightclub. Above all, it has a great performance by Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong, as a scullery maid whom club owner Jameson Thomas makes the star of his show, both public and private. She knows how to use her "brooding sexuality" (Brand's phrase) to her advantage. The fluid camerawork and rich physical vocabulary of the silent actors contrast sharply with one of the disc's extras: a stiff, awkward five-minute prologue filmed in sound with actor Thomas as a way to help the film find an audience in the then-new age of talkies.
CLASSICS FOR KIDS
Remember where you were when you first heard Bambi's mother had died? Probably sitting in front of the screen bawling, realizing at the same moment as the young deer that the sound of the offscreen gunshot was bad news. The DVD of the 1942 animated feature Bambi includes an hour-long reconstruction, based on a stenographer's notes, of the story meetings at which Walt Disney moulded the tale into the shape he wanted. Fawns supplied by the state of Maine and footage of Maine's forests helped the animators create the world Bambi shares with the irrepressible rabbit Thumper and the skunk Flower. A great achievement, but parents should be on hand to help young ones deal with the death of mom.