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MM19: Hawks Screwballs feat. Theda Hammel & John Early (Patreon)

Published:
2024-05-08 11:00:08
Edited:
2025-08-12 21:26:18
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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We’re joined by Theda Hammel & John Early to revisit director Howard Hawks, this time look at two of his classic screwball comedies: 1940’s His Girl Friday and 1938’s Bringing Up Baby. Both feature Cary Grant in complete goofball-mode bedeviled by brassy women who refuse to give him a dang break. His Girl Friday adds the levity of newsroom hijinks while reporting on the impending execution of an accused murderer, while Baby brings us the hilarious light touch of Grant and Katharine Hepburn dealing with a live leopard. 

Theda & John’s new movie Stress Positions is in theaters now!

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Comments

Spencer horne

At least the movies this week are actually good

Michael S. Judge

on the subject of gorgeous hilarious men who are good at falling over, I've always thought Marcello Mastroianni in LA DOLCE VITA (and, to a lesser degree, 8-1/2) was basically doing a suave Italian version of Cary Grant

Fingerless

first documented case of pulling a bad bitch by being autistic

George Lochinski

Holy crap Stress Positions looks like a cool movie

Jaime Christley

Most of the men in Old Hollywood who became stars started out as Cary Grant did: kept boys, hustlers, walkers, gigolos, etc. That's why the image of the strapping young man in Hollywood movies is almost always inherently homoerotic: using the cover of making all the girls swoon and scream (and what better cover than something 100% true) to show off an elite generation of men who sucked their way to their big break. Not entirely unrelated, in the lesser screwball comedy MY FAVORITE WIFE, there's a scene where Cary Grant has visions of Randolph Scott doing acrobatics.

emalco

Great episode. Cary Grant leaping in his feathery robe and exclaiming about going gay all of a sudden — there couldn’t be a more cathartic (though temporary) busting through of the stifling Production Code. The history of the Code is so fascinating. Despite the fact that so many masterpieces were made in Hollywood during the MPPC’s heyday, I often wonder how US popular culture might have developed differently without the Code’s infantilizing and squeamish influence during the period when I think movies were at their height of domestic popularity.

Jason Matthews

Is Tom Cruise the last rent-coded Hollywood superstar? Like, others were surely open for business too, but it wasn't incorporated into their brand with an early career striptease.

Giorgiosiwa

i would kill or die for the great theda hammel

Jaime Christley

That tracks, although in large part bc Tom Cruise is one of the last Hollywood superstars, full stop. There are uh, some who have theories about young Clint.... (Nothing but respect for the hustler boys, for the record!)

Jaime Christley

Shit, you know what I forgot: isn't the Church of [mechanical beeping noise obscures the third word here] supposed to be a bit of a blackmail operation for closeted Hollywood men? One could hypothesize, if someone is a household name - in cinema or any other medium - and if someone were, say, a recent Best Actor Academy Award winner who may very well have exhibited their mental health issues in a very public way, one might hypothesize that a certain "church" is basically holding their sexuality hostage, and for no small fee.

etienne

if they released a live wild large feline near me it would want to nuzzle and protect me I'm just built different

Chris Wade

thought this watching Trouble In Paradise from 1932 recently, how much old fashioned horniness, lewdness and rudeness we were denied documentation of during those crucial ~35 years, and how it might have made everyone a little less psychotically repressed later

John Leavitt

so wild to watch pre-code movies and have people drop references to cocaine or saying a guy is going to blow sailors later - although during the code the fans being in on the joke was part of the fun , Grant in My Favorite Wife having this over the top horny reaction to seeing Randolph Scott in a swimsuit is for the people reading between the lines of them moving into Bachelor Hall etc etc

RG13

Sub mental oaf is grand.

Jason Matthews

I'm pretty confident Clint Howard skipped the casting couch on his brother's movies, but Evilspeak is front loaded with sexual menace.

tom benander

ok i have bad news. i just watched bringing up baby, and despite the brilliant casting, the writing was atrocious and inexplicable. and i don't know if the file was corrupted but the colors were so dull, it was practically monochrome. you guys talk about this film like it was a masterpiece. I am sorry to report it's actually drek. absolute drek. give me my two hours back. we should have listened when they panned it on release.

tom benander

capitalist boot licking drek

Bert

Katherine Hepburn is definitely Bugs but Cary Grant is daffy duck

Shiv

All Cary Grant, all the time!! 🤩😌

Shiv

love to hear none of you being normal about Cary either

Dustin Nelson

Where was that "she ---- and he just wants to build dinosaurs" line from Hesse in the timeline? Wanted to use that for something and lost track.

Dustin Nelson

Sothern Comfort and Extreme Prejudice were pretty cool. I didn't have the chance to watch these first but I don't watch the movies that get ribbed on like Civil War, so figured it was fine.

Jaime Christley

The arrival of talking pictures was such a shift for the industry that Hollywood basically had to learn how to make films all over again, which is one of the main reasons why the pre-Code era, apart from all the ribaldry we associate with it, also featured some of the most exciting and playful visual and sound design the cinema would ever offer. It would be around 1934, 1935 that "ways of doing things" (such as studio house styles and/or directors with rigorous personal styles) became much more codified. Not to say these Code-overseen years didn't offer their share of brilliant films - just that the pre-Code era was a real Wild West for film grammar. It might only be a coincidence that the Code descended just as Hollywood film grammar was effectively consolidated - but maybe it wasn't.

angel

Love Theda's laugh

Ryan Burkhardt

please for the love of god review the thin man series!!!

Warbs

I'm going to out myself- when season 2 preview came out I thought they said the baby was a leper...

James King

Chapo went on Gabrus' podcast??? Crossover I never expected to see. Now just holding out for an episode of Twinnovation with Brace Belden as a guest...

P$

“Only Angels Have Wings-“ is my favorite Howard Hawks film. It was overlooked because it came out in 1939 which was the same year as Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, and Wizard of Oz.

RG13

Howard Hawk’s Evilspeak. Mental.

Lady

“Jennifer Jason lay” 😩

buttface

filler content

Tvvvv

Will: “Katherine… is the most frightening, menacing, and dangerous person ever depicted” Psychology

Jaime Christley

There's like 10 Howard Hawks films that I'd have no trouble calling "the greatest film ever made" and that's one of them. That era was a boon for great aviation pictures, high and low. The seedy/sweaty FLIGHT FROM GLORY (Lew Landers), the Hawksian Victor Fleming film TEST PILOT, the prototype for ONLY ANGELS from Hawks himself, the hyperspeed-paced CEILING ZERO, John Ford's AIR MAIL, and a lesser-known one called NIGHT FLIGHT, kind of a forerunner to the 1970 blockbuster AIRPORT, and one of the few films to feature bros John and Lionel Barrymore sharing scenes. It was almost as if, if you made a movie about flyers during the 1930s, you could do no wrong.

THEKILLERWHALE

Shout out to Richard Barthelmess. He is in a supporting role in Only Angels Have Wings and is an utterly captivating screen presence. I had no idea who he was but he was apparently a silent film star whose career kind of trailed off during the 30's. But it was still clear in that film that he had IT.

THEKILLERWHALE

My favorite part of that movie is when Thomas Mitchell is mortally wounded and he says his goodbyes and then everyone just leaves him to die totally alone in this side room of a bar.

Jaime Christley

Barthelmess really had a face that brought "silent movie" to ONLY ANGELS, giving the project some stake in cinema's past whereas a lot of the rest of the cast feels more "of the moment" and/or more modern-seeming. The moment after Kid dies and they're all gathered at the bar and Geoff tells MacPherson "the Kid said to buy you a drink" - never fails to punch me square in the gut.

The Children of Jack Acid

The dog WAS the dog in The Thin Man. His real name is "Skippy" but he often went by "Asta" due to how big his role was in The Thin Man: From Wikipedia: Skippy (also known as Asta, 1931–1951) was a Wire Fox Terrier dog actor who appeared in dozens of movies during the 1930s. Skippy is best known for the role of the pet dog "Asta" in the 1934 detective comedy The Thin Man, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, and for his role in the 1938 comedy Bringing Up Baby, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Due to the popularity of The Thin Man role, Skippy is sometimes credited as Asta in public and in other films.

Shelby

Yesss Theda is back

Equality State Of Mind

Hesse's read on Bringing Up Baby would have merit, if Big Pharma hadn't invented anxiety dreams in 1994 (for obvious reasons).

Equality State Of Mind

Didn't the capitalists pan it because they thought Hepburn was a commie?