Screwball comedy emerged as the United States grappled with the Great Depression. In 1934, when It Happened One Night premiered, unemployment was still hovering at over 20%, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program could not help the populace fast enough. Hollywood wasn’t spared. America’s film industry had enjoyed some 20 years of unencumbered prosperity, capped by a late-1920s attendance boom fueled by the novelty of sound film technology. But during the Depression, dwindling audiences and falling ticket prices forced some major studios into receivership and others to sell valuable assets, like their theaters, to stay afloat. With the industry reporting a collective loss of nearly $250 million between 1930 and 1933, it’s no surprise that uneasiness took hold in the cultural zeitgeist.
The Depression rears its ugly head throughout the screwball genre, thematically puncturing some of its most jubilant moments. In a scene from It Happened One Night, Peter, Ellie, and the other bus passengers break out into a chorus of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” Capra captures class solidarity with immense warmth and grace, but that joyful camaraderie falls back down to Earth with the fearful scream of a young boy whose mother has fainted from hunger. In Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living (1937), protagonist Mary Smith grudgingly breaks her piggy bank to scrimp together enough money to cover her $7 per week rent. And in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936)—perhaps the most socially engaged film of the classical screwball era—forgotten men become collectible objects in a scavenger hunt for Manhattan’s upper class.
In spite of the genre’s political grounding, screwball comedy didn’t aim to offer practical solutions to socioeconomic precarity. Philosopher Stanley Cavell once mused that screwball comedies were “fairytales for the Depression”—where else but screwball could a $58,000 sable fur coat fall on a working-class woman’s head and turn her life upside down? In the screwball fairyland, the Depression’s omnipresence is counterbalanced with kookiness and absurdity.
Screwball’s proclivity for the fantastic is also reflected in the genre’s approach to romance, which it navigated amid the constraints of the 1934 Motion Picture Production Code, informally known as the Hays Code. To stave off the looming threat of federal censorship laws, in July 1934, Hollywood studios uniformly implemented this series of guidelines. The Hays Code regulated everything from how scripts could approach topics such as crime, adultery, and sex. And it dictated that all movies must communicate redeeming social mores.
