Instead of sending your sweetie the usual Valentine's Day card, consider a surprise video rental from that evergreen genre about being crazy in love -- the screwball comedy.
Falling in love which suggests a sudden instability. Screwball comedy goes further. Its very name says that being in love is a form of temporary insanity. Giddy, goofy and a perpetual high, but nuts.
In the usual romantic comedy, the lead couple plays it straight, leaving the funny stuff to a supporting couple. Screwball comedy combines the straight and the wacky in one couple, and the plot and most of the characters are off-center, too.
Consider the most extreme example of the genre, director Howard Hawks' decidedly deranged "Bringing Up Baby" (1938). In the more conventional romantic comedy, the writer and director figure out a way for their main gal and guy to "meet cute," as the movie expression goes. In "Baby," Susan (Katharine Hepburn) and David (Cary Grant) meet on a golf course. Absent-minded zoologist David, wearing Harold Lloyd glasses and a constant air of confusion, sees Susan playing his ball. For golfing obsessives, this is a crime worthy of tar and feathers on the 19th hole.
David sputters, protests, runs after her like a goony bird.
And lofty Susan? She gazes at him as if he were an escapee from Bedlam.
Then she mistakenly gets into his car, firmly convinced it's hers, and bangs up the fenders while he insists it is his car.
She calmly replies: Your ball? Your car? Is there anything that isn't yours?
Yes, he allows. "You," thank goodness.
Well! She decides, as women often do in screwball comedy, that she will indeed be his. Those who consider "Baby" (Baby is a leopard, by the way) the definitive screwball comedy may be surprised to learn that it was not well-received by critics or the public when first released. Even now its effect on viewers is decidedly not uniform.
Fortunately for the genre, the first acknowledged screwball comedy was a huge hit with the public and won the five major Academy Awards. That would, of course, be "It Happened One Night" (1934). Among the many ironies of the film's success is that director Frank Capra is about the last person you'd associate with this genre. Also, MGM's Clark Gable didn't want to appear in the Columbia Pictures flick: Columbia was then known as Poverty Row, and Gable's studio was "punishing" him by making him do the role. Claudette Colbert didn't want to be in it either, but her career at Paramount Pictures was apparently on hold.
