Ilsa had thought the film was a return to the screwball romantic comedies of the nineteen-thirties, but Mrs.

NEWYORKER: The Valetudinarian

Which brings us, unavoidably, to "Leatherheads, " the disappointingly leaden, if eager-to-please attempt by George Clooney, the movie's star and director, to evoke the screwball comedies of Hawks, Cukor and Sturges.

WSJ: Film Review

The screwball comedy represents a pinnacle of American filmmaking.

CNN: Review: 'Leatherheads' drops the ball

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.

NEWYORKER: Elizabethtown

But George Clooney attempts something a little more sophisticated in "Leatherheads": a screwball comedy set during the early days of professional football in the mid-1920s.

CNN: Review: 'Leatherheads' drops the ball

For instance, he was the very first film reviewer to appreciate screwball comedy, and he had an uncanny ability to spot other varieties of cinematic excellence and explain them long before other critics caught the scent.

WSJ: Otis Ferguson: A Film and Jazz Critic Still Waiting for His Due | Sightings By Terry Teachout

"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.

WSJ: 'Nice Work If You Can Get It' to close in June

"Lady By Choice" (1934) was released five months after Howard Hawks's "Twentieth Century, " a defining screwball comedy in which Lombard goes mano a mano with the great John Barrymore.

WSJ: Lombard on the Path to Stardom | 'Carole Lombard in the Thirties' | By David Mermelstein

Frustrated that his cast couldn't fit the dialogue into a single shot, Mr. Eastwood took a cue from Howard Hawks's fast-talking screwball comedy to punch up a brooding Boston-set crime melodrama.

WSJ: Conserving the Horse He Rode in On