16 November 2008

Divorce Hitchcock style

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

(1941)

Back in the day, when my first VCR was new and so was AMC, I used to tape zillions of movies there. Then TCM came along, and was better, and I taped zillions more. Then I realized that I wasn't really watching many of those movies, and then AMC started showing commercials, and then I got a DVD player and became snobbish about watching movies on tape and built a sizable disc collection while getting rid of most of my tapes.

Then last week I got DirecTV and a DVR, and then I discovered that I had IFC in my basic package, which inspired me to record a couple of movies, which is so much easier than setting up to record on a VCR (and no, I'm not one of those people whose VCR has flashed 12:00 since I first plugged it in), and that in turn inspired me to take another look at AMC and TCM, and that in turn led to recording about a dozen films to be shown in the two weeks then showing on the schedule.

I don't know how this will really affect my viewing habits, but I do know that if I never watch any of the dozen or so films other than this one, they will never take up any physical storage space, and the digital space they're occupying won't be an issue for a long time, and when it becomes one--hey, I'll get another chance to record those films, and it'll be just as easy the next time, so it won't hurt to delete 'em. Oh, brave new world . . .

Anyway, while Hitchcock employed screwball elements with some regularity (think drunk-driving scene in North by Northwest, or backscratcher scene in Rear Window, or even potato-truck sequence in Frenzy), this seems to have been his only full-length essay of the genre, and while it's no Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday, it's not bad. And good lord, was there anybody better at screwball dame-ism than Carole Lombard? No, there was not.

It's not exactly a feminist tract--screwball was very good at giving feminism a voice and then silencing it with a timely and appreciated sock to the jaw--but what are you gonna do?

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