The screwball comedy represents a pinnacle of American filmmaking.

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The screening schedule for February includes the screwball comedy 92 The Legendary la Rose Noire (1992), which offers a farcical look ahead to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Britain back to China.

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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.

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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.

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All that the movie aspires to be is a speedy, bubbly screwball-comedy whodunit something like a Bob Hope vehicle from the forties.

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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.

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"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.

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"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.

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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.

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