The most enchanting thing about The Hudsucker Proxy is its commitment to the bit. The Coen brothers put all their cards on the table, wholly investing in a fictional world that borrows from the past while bargaining on the future.
Peter Bogdanovich's 1975 jukebox musical comedy At Long Last Love ultimately can’t stray too far from its champagne-colored view of the world—best pour yourself a glass and join in. Come on: it’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely.
That Noah Baumbach's Mistress America is set in New York City is not in and of itself remarkable; New York City is the setting of a number of films. What’s remarkable is that it's set in Brooke’s New York—the New York of fiction and exaggeration, of bizarre anecdotes and urban legend, of viral tweets and collective myth.
Preston Sturges’s stories are expert and clean constructions, turnt on drips of irony dribbled out far as they’ll go before they snap back into classical resolution of form: marriage and remarriage, sometimes three times over. But Sturges’s writing—a process that we might say touches story with style and translates the science of “motivation” into the language of desire—resides and thrives in the fugitive space of non-optimizable chaos.
Watching The Comeback in 2024, ten years after the conclusion of its second and final season, the overtly misogynistic cruelty of this set-up still achieves an infuriating, resonant tenor.
In addition to inspiring the genre’s name, Carole Lombard can also lay claim to shaping the classical-era screwball heroine.
The Thin Man created a truly equal romantic partnership that was neither stumbling toward matrimony nor frustrated by its restraints, a portrait of a thoroughly modern marriage so ahead of its time you can hardly believe it's nearing its centennial anniversary.