"The Doctor Takes a Wife" (1940) - Analysis of the Screwball Genre

"The Doctor Takes a Wife" (1940) starring Loretta Young and Ray Milland, directed by Alexander Hall and scripted by George Seaton.

"The Doctor Takes a Wife" is a 1940 Columbia screwball comedy included in the Icons of Screwball Comedy, Volume 2 boxed set. It pairs Ray Milland and Loretta Young, and rather successfully too. The first thing you need for a successful screwball comedy is a plot that will set up the necessary misunderstandings and confusions. This one does that quite successfully.

June Cameron (Loretta Young) has just written a best-selling book on the joys of spinsterhood. At a hotel she runs into Dr Timothy Sterling (Ray Milland) and persuades him to give her a lift to New York. They don’t exactly hit it off at all but she needs the lift. When they stop briefly for her to send a telegraph they encounter a wedding party. By mistake the Just Married sign gets attached to the back of Dr Sterling’s car. This is spotted by an eagle-eyed reporter who is delighted to have stumbled upon such a scoop - here is the woman who has just written a book telling women they don’t need men or marriage and apparently she has just gone and got married!

Her publisher is initially aghast. If the public learns that June is married her book isn’t going to sell any further copies and he will be ruined, and June’s career will be ruined. If she denies it there’s the problem of the aforementioned half-dressed man in her bedroom. Then he gets a brainwave. There are more married women than unmarried women in America, so if the author of the book that extolled the joys of spinsterhood now writes a book extolling the joys of marriage it will be an even bigger bestseller.

All they have to do is to persuade Dr Sterling to go along with their newly-hatched plan to pretend that he and June really are married. Once the book has made a mint they can get a quickie divorce in Reno. Persuading Dr Sterling to co-operate will be the awkward part. But not as awkward as they expected. The good doctor, currently a poorly paid lecturer in neuro-psychiatry, is desperate for a professorship. And when the dean, who believes all professors of psychiatry should be married, hears of the marriage Timothy Sterling gets his professorship. So now he has a motive to go along with the pretend marriage as well.

Of course in a screwball comedy you just know that such an intricate plan will go spectacularly wrong. The problem is that Timothy wanted the professorship so he would have enough money to marry his sweetheart Marilyn (Gail Patrick). Trying to keep Marilyn persuaded that his marriage is not a real one while trying to keep the dean and his colleagues at the university convinced that he really is living in connubial bliss is enough to set off the necessary chain of craziness on which screwball comedy depends.

The second requirement for a successful screwball comedy is a screenplay that turns the potentially comedic situations into situations that are genuinely funny. George Seaton and Ken Englund’s screenplay fulfills that requirement very neatly. Having a director who can keep the pacing as tight as possible is obviously essential as well and Alexander Hall does that with ease.

The third necessary ingredient for screwball comedy success is two leads who can exploit all these other advantages and who have the right chemistry. Ray Milland and Loretta Young fulfill both these requirements with considerable aplomb. A screwball comedy needs two leads who start off hating and infuriating each other and they manage that extremely well. With all these ingredients perfectly combined the result is a delightful example of the genre.

Ray Milland and Loretta Young are both in fine form and the supporting players are more than competent. A romantic comedy needs to convince us that even though the two leads are both convinced that they want to marry other people they really belong together. This means that the characters they think they want to marry can’t be too sympathetic - the audience has to want the leads to end up together.

Reginald Gardiner and Gail Patrick do their bit in that respect - we can’t possibly imagine June will really marry the selfish and self-centred Johnny or that Timothy could seriously want to go ahead with marriage to the rather appalling Marilyn. Gardiner and Patrick make sure we won’t be on the side of their characters will still making them delightfully funny.

"The Doctor Takes a Wife" breezes along to its entirely satisfying conclusion and a great deal of fun is had along the way. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable example of a well-made and well-acted screwball comedy and it all works to perfection. The DVD transfer is exceptionally good. "The Doctor Takes a Wife" is highly recommended. Source: dfordoom-movieramblings.blogspot.com

The construction of romance as ideology in screwball comedies has to involve more than the mere use of the triadic deep-structure. Romance requires that we invest in the hope that a certain couple will achieve the bliss discussed earlier. In screwball comedies, this is done in part by casting. We cannot imagine Rosalind Russell in love with Ralph Bellamy in 'His Girl Friday.' We want her to be with Cary Grant from the moment they meet in his office at the beginning of the film. These films tell us early on who we are supposed to root for. The most sustained analysis of screwball comedy to date is Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness. Cavell claims to have noticed a previously unrecognized film genre, the comedy of remarriage, which he believes begins with 'It Happened One Night' (1934).

His central claim is that the comedy of remarriage shifts "emphasis away from the normal question of comedy, whether a young pair will get married, onto the question whether the pair will get and stay divorced, thus prompting philosophical discussions of the nature of marriage". Without going into the vexed issues of genre theory, Cavell does make a strong case for these films as a group that can profitably be studied together. Why did remarriage suddenly become a more important issue than marriage? Germaine Greer argues persuasively that Shakespearean comedy expresses a new, middle-class myth that linked romantic love and marriage. This myth having become widely accepted, the comedy of remarriage is very likely a response to what was perceived as a crisis of marriage. As Elaine Tyler May puts it, "During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American marriages began to collapse at an unprecedented rate. Between 1867 and 1929, the population of the United States grew 300 percent, the number of marriages increased 400 percent, and the divorce rate rose 2000 percent. The project of the comedies of remarriage is to reaffirm this romantic view of marriage in the face of the fact of its failure.

For one thing, only two of Cavell's seven comedies deal with characters who we actually see interacting as husband and wife for any length of time, and one of these, 'Adam's Rib,' is entirely atypical. That leaves 'The Awful Truth,' which Cavell calls "the best, or deepest, of the comedies of remarriage", and of which he says "it is the only member of the genre in which the topic of divorce ... [is] undisplaced," as the only pure example of the type. In the other comedies, remarriage is presented only meta-phorically, or, in the case of 'The Philadelphia Story,' as the conclusion to a story that takes place after the couple has been divorced. Secondly, each of the seven Cavell does not define "romance," but he accepts the view that romance deals in the fantastic, that it is less realistic than the comedy of manners.

He says of 'The Lady Eve,' "that Preston Sturges is trying to tell us that tales of romance are inherently feats of coney catching, of conning, making gulls or suckers of their audience".  As Cavell argues at the end of his chapter on His Girl Friday: It is a premise of farce that marriage kills romance. It is a project of the genre of remarriage to refuse to draw a conclusion from this premise but rather to turn the tables on farce, to turn marriage itself into romance, to find as it were a moral equivalent of the immoral. Cavell seems thus to contradict himself: comedies of remarriage tell us that romance is illusion and depict marriage romantically, but they can still tell us the truth about marriage. His claim that the comedy of remarriage prompts "philosophical discussions on the nature of marriage" is undermined by his own remarks about romance, but we are also led to wonder why, if these films are intended to prompt "philosophical discussions on the nature of marriage," they must deal with characters who are not married to each other.

What Cavell does not consider in 'Pursuits of Happiness' is that romance is more than simple illusion and more than a genre: it is a complex and tenacious ideology. As an ideology, romance obviously bears some connection to illusion, but there is a more important connection to the genre. The specific illusion that the screwball comedy constructs is that one can have both complete desire and complete satisfaction, and that the name for this state of affairs is marriage. But the other side of the romantic economy is that satisfaction is the death of desire. Romantic tragedies such as 'Tristan and Isolde' allegorize this in the literal deaths of the lovers. According to Juliet Mitchell, romance seeks an idealized object. The resistance by the woman to the man's claim upon her produces dialogue that is the verbal equivalent of foreplay, that is to say, teasing. I say foreplay, rather than seduction, because the result of the conversations is to increase desire on all sides without making the woman seem like a mere conquest.

The male side of the dialogue, however, is an odd form of foreplay. Rather than speaking seductively, the males in screwball comedies typically scold, lecture, admonish, or preach. In the codes of the screwball comedy, what this tells us is that the man cares, but it also mimics rational persuasion, something that corresponds to the presumption that the woman must choose her mate. In addition to its expression in verbal fireworks, romance is projected onto a pastoral vision of a place where the constraints and sins of civilization may be shed, and innocence renewed. It may be the island of Peter Warne's dreams, the landscape of the Lord estate, or the honeymoon place to which Walter and Hildy are bound at the end of 'His Girl Friday.' Romance demands not just on desire and affection, but also on isolation from the claims of everyday life, a setting far removed from everyday life: the forest, the ocean, a desert island, etc.

And yet in the Hollywood comedies I am discussing, most of the action takes place well within everyday settings. It is the purpose of each of these films to do what Cavell asserts only of His Girl Friday: to romanticize being at home, the everyday, even the black world. What distinguishes the suburbs, be they near Philadelphia or in Connecticut, is not their exotica, their isolation-though the latter is part of their attraction-but rather the luxury, the wealth, they represent.

The screwball films suggest that spunky, strong women are attractive, but that their submission is required for the romance to be consummated, for marriage to take place. In this sense, they are comedies of conquest, the woman being not like one more bird taken in the hunt, but like the duchy one wishes to annex. But for the marriage to occur, these films often ask us to believe that their heroines are changed utterly as a result of experiences described in the narrative. This change is often represented in a sudden reversal of the woman's repeatedly stated position or attitude, the most striking example of which, in this genre, is Tracy Lord's last minute acceptance of Dexter. We accept the happy ending in part because of the romance that has been constructed as erotic tension seeking to be relieved in orgasm. In this sense, the ending functions as a consummation of our desire as well. -"Mystifying Marriage" by David R. Shumway - Cinema Journal 30, No. 4, Summer 1991

By the 1930s the comic anti-hero had begun to supplant the crackerbarrel figure in American humor. Credit for the full description of this new type of character is often given to four New Yorker writers: Clarence Day, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and S. J. Perelman. At the same time the new comic figure was seen in American cinema as Leo McCarey's Laurel & Hardy. Unlike the crackerbarrel figure, the antihero is usually a childlike, leisure-laden urban type, frustrated by women and uninterested in politics. In a new century encumbered with confusing mechanization and soaring population, when the promise of the American dream seemed threatened by an increasingly irrational world, it became much easier to associate humor with a figure based in frustration. Thurber's and Benchley's works best exemplify the anti-hero; these two authors were most productive during this period.

Even when a basic workingclass job is allowed in the screwball genre, it can rarely be trusted to be what it seems. For example, the taxi driver (Don Ameche) so enamored of Claudette Colbert in Mitchell Leisen's 'Midnight' is actually a prince who drives a cab as a lark. To add to the confusion, Ameche also pretends at one point to be a baron.

In another Leisen film, 'Easy Living,' Jean Arthur's eventual beau (Ray Milland) works as a busboy in a food automat, but in reality he is the rebellious son of a millionaire father. In an irrational world, it is safest and most productive to behave irrationally. Unfortunately, the male of the genre has difficulty breaking with the tradition of rationality; he does not see why things cannot be pursued logically. This trait is best exemplified in Hawks's absent-minded professors, who are comfortable in academia but lost in the real world. Yet the dilemma goes beyond some cloistered naïveté of the professional scholar. It is a comic problem afflicting most males within the genre.

When these males begin to act strange, their behavior is seldom the eccentric pose of the female, but rather a full-fledged breakdown. The glossy window dressing of the 1930s screwball comedy helped make the first anti-hero feature film wave more palatable to an audience grounded in capable comedy characters. In today's catch-22-modern world, a genre devoted to topsyturvydom still seems to offer a number of valuable insights. -"Screwball Comedy: Defining a Film Genre" (1983) by Wes D. Gehring