But George Clooney attempts something a little more sophisticated in "Leatherheads": a screwballcomedy set during the early days of professional football in the mid-1920s.
"Lady By Choice" (1934) was released five months after Howard Hawks's "Twentieth Century, " a defining screwballcomedy in which Lombard goes mano a mano with the great John Barrymore.
Frustrated that his cast couldn't fit the dialogue into a single shot, Mr. Eastwood took a cue from Howard Hawks's fast-talking screwballcomedy to punch up a brooding Boston-set crime melodrama.
For instance, he was the very first film reviewer to appreciate screwballcomedy, and he had an uncanny ability to spot other varieties of cinematic excellence and explain them long before other critics caught the scent.
The writer-director Cameron Crowe is attempting a modern screwball comedy the kind of thing that, sixty years ago, would have been a swiftly paced romantic farce but he has scaled the movie as an epic and turned his heroine into a font of New Age wisdom.
"Nice Work If You Can Get It" is a screwball romantic comedy that takes place in the 1920s and tells the story of a female bootlegger who meets a wealthy, often-drunken playboy, played by Matthew Broderick.