"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.
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.
The classic works of Ernst Lubitsch, HowardHawks and Preston Sturges married witty verbal banter with lowbrow physical slapstick, finding their focus in the battle of the sexes and making a mockery of the puritanical Production Code.