There is a kind of
merry war betwixt Signor Benedick and her. They never
meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them.”
Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing. Act 1. Scene 1
“Your ego is absolutely colossal”
“Yeah, yeah, not bad, hows yours?”
Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night
Screwball comedy as a genre came and went relatively quickly, having its hey day in essentially an 8 year period (1934-1942). Sure, more would be made as the years went on. Movies like Seems Like Old Times and Mistress America paid homage to the genre born out of The Great Depression and changed it up for a modern setting. What few contemporary screwball comedies ever attempted to do was to dig a little deeper. To dig down past the expected beats and tenants of the genre and into its roots, drawing parallels between screwball comedy and its origins in the Shakespearean body of work. This is what Joss Whedon does in his 2012 low-fi retelling of Much Ado About Nothing. The film is an exercise in highlighting the elements of screwball comedy taken directly from The Bard’s famous play.
Much Ado About Nothing does this by plunging its color palette in black and white, taking us back to those old movies of yesteryear (although it was admittedly done to hide unseemly background objects and make up for the limited amount of lighting set up available). The men are clad in black suits and ties and groomed to be as debonair as possible and the ladies are wearing their best dresses, but not gowns. It’s a boozy weekend (Joss stated in an interview with Wired magazine that, “There are certain things in this movie that just don’t make sense unless the characters are super-drunk.”) and the dress isn’t quite gala attire. While the dialogue is the same as the original play, it’s fired off with the dizzying speed that made movies like It Happened One Night (largely considered the first true screwball comedy) so much fun to watch. The Beatrice and Benedick of this film (Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof respectively) have the same catty energy that Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert had. They’re not so much firing insults like arrows, as much as they are swatting them back at each other like two tennis pros at the top of their game. The farce is played up to 11. Farce is typically born out of misunderstanding and mistaken identities, two things Shakespeare and screwball comedies have in spades. The plot to Much Ado About Nothing revolves around princes and royalty tricking two difficult people into falling in love with each other and Joss plays these machinations with the giddiness of the meddling supporting characters of movies like Philadelphia Story and My Man Godfrey.
In addition to all these tropes of the genre the movie plays with its own modernity. It Happened One Night was released months before the “Hays Code” ( moral guidelines put in place to tone down the risque content of films) so the movie gets away with a shirtless Clark Gable and lace and satin wearing Claudette Colbert. For the most part however, the film implies most of its sexual content (the “Wall of Jericho” coming down at the end of the movie). The original text of Much Ado About Nothing is littered allusions and descriptions of sex. Benedick tells Beatrice that he will “live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes.” “Die” was a frequently used euphemism for an orgasm. The movie takes most of the innuendo out and puts the sex right there on screen. Critic Andrew Sarris called screwball comedy “a sex comedy without the sex.” This was mostly due to the standards of the times. Joss wants to highlight that these movies and plays were wrought with sexual tension and that in 2012 you don’t have to be so coy about it.
All this lust and tension leads to the final parallel Joss draws between Shakespeare and screwball: Marriage. He points out how they’re usually hastily thrown together and not very well thought out. Gable and Colbert’s characters fall in love and get married despite only really knowing each other for a few days. Benedick and Beatrice get married despite finding out that they’ve been duped into affection for each other. Joss plays it with a winking eye, having the actors play the moments as kind of foolish in the end. The marriage and its circumstances in a modern setting highlight the biggest element of screwball comedy and Shakespeare: For as quick witted as these people are, sex and alcohol will make you do some pretty silly things.
It Happened One Night directed by Frank Capra screens Monday, April 17, 2017 at 3:00 p.m. as part of IU Cinema’s Monday Matinee Classics Series. Other films by Frank Capra screened at IU Cinema include Ball of Fire, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
Frank Capra’s sublime comedy The Strong Man (1926) will be screened with a World Premiere of its new orchestral score in February of 2019 as part of the Jon Vickers Film Scoring Award, which annually commissions a new orchestral score for a silent film to be premiered with a student orchestra thanks to a generous gift from The Honorable P.A. Mack, Jr.
Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing screened at IU Cinema in August 2013 in the International Arthouse Series. In 2011 IU Cinema screened Joss Whedon’s sci-fi adventure Serenity.
David Carter is a film lover and a menace. He plays jazz from time to time but asks you not to hold that against him. His taste in movies bounces from Speed Racer to The Holy Mountain and everything in between.