Join us as the Central Library’s Literature Into Film Festival continues with a new series:
Screwball Comedies
January 18 - February 22
7:00 pm on Thursday evenings
Screwball became a popular slang word in the 1930s. It was applied to films where everything was a juxtaposition: educated and uneducated, rich and poor, intelligent and stupid, honest and dishonest, and most of all male and female. In screwball comedy, when two people fell in love they did not simply surrender to their feelings, they battled it out.
Screwball comedy crested in the late 1930s. Characteristics of the genre were a well written script laced with barbed dialog; an overlapping style of delivery with lines tossed off in rapid fire; an emphasis on elegant clothes, cars, and furniture; exotic locales; and supporting casts of first-rate character actors playing eccentric types as well as a stable of familiar faces such as Cary Grant, William Powell, Carole Lombard, Claudette Colbert, and Katharine Hepburn in leading roles.
Schedule:
January 18:
It Happened One Night (1934) 105 minutes
Director: Frank Capra
Author: Samuel Hopkins Adams (short story)
January 25:
The Thin Man (1934) 93 minutes
Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Author: Dashiell Hammett (novel)
February 1:
My Man Godfrey (1936) 94 minutes
Director: Gregory LaCava
Author: Eric Hatch (novel: 1101 Park Avenue)
February 8:
Philadelphia Story (1940) 112 minutes
Director: George Cukor
Author: Philip Barry (play)
February 15:
His Girl Friday (1940) 92 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Author: Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur (play: The Front Page)
February 22:
The Lady Eve (1941) 97 minutes
Director: Preston Sturges
Author: Monckton Hoffe (short story)
The film series is sponsored by the Friends of the Medford Library. For more information call 774-8689, or email medref@jcls.org | 
