Screwball Comedies
Sort by:
Showing 1-50 of 273
Decade:
Rating:
List Type:
Plot: A chorus girl, stranded in Paris, is "set up" by a millionaire to break up his wife's affair with another man.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Mitchell Leisen
Stars: Claudette Colbert, Don Ameche, John Barrymore
Coby's rating:
You Can't Take It with You (1938)
Plot: A man from a family of rich snobs becomes engaged to a woman from a good-natured but decidedly eccentric family.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Frank Capra
Stars: Jean Arthur, Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart
Coby's rating:
Plot: A series of misunderstandings on their fourth wedding anniversary lead an architect and his wife to break up, but he pretends to be insane and even poses as his own sister in order to win her back.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Jack Conway
Stars: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Gail Patrick
Coby's rating:
Plot: A flamboyant Broadway impresario who has fallen on hard times tries to get his former lover, now a Hollywood diva, to return and resurrect his failing career.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Howard Hawks
Stars: John Barrymore, Carole Lombard, Walter Connolly
Coby's rating:
Plot: Woodrow LaFayette wants to join the Marines, but he's 4F. So he leaves his hometown and with friends, who send postcards from all over the war theaters, and he fakes a heroic career. This has its consequences...
Genre: Comedy | War
Director: Preston Sturges
Stars: Eddie Bracken, Ella Raines, Raymond Walburn
Platinum Blonde (1931)
Plot: A young woman from a very rich family impulsively marries a reporter, but each assumes the other is the one whose lifestyle must change.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Preston Sturges
Stars: Loretta Young, Robert Williams, Jean Harlow
Coby's rating:
Arsenic and Old Lace (1943)
Plot: A drama critic learns on his wedding day that his beloved maiden aunts are homicidal maniacs, and that insanity runs in his family.
Genre: Comedy | Crime | Romance
Director: Frank Capra
Stars: Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, Peter Lorre
Coby's rating:
Plot: Dan McGinty has great success in his chosen field of crooked politics. But endangers it all in one crazy moment of honesty...
Genre: Comedy
Director: Preston Sturges
Stars: Brian Donlevy, Muriel Angelus, Akim Tamiroff
Coby's rating:
Plot: Boring businessman Larry Wilson recovers from amnesia and discovers he's really a con man...and loves his soon-to-be-ex wife.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Stars: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Frank McHugh
Coby's rating:
Come Live with Me (1941)
Plot: Seeking US citizenship, a Viennese refugee arranges a marriage of convenience with a struggling writer.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Clarence Brown
Stars: James Stewart, Hedy Lamarr, Ian Hunter
Coby's rating:
Plot: Helen and Ken are a pretty strange couple. She is a pathological liar, and he is a scrupulously honest (and therefore unsuccessful) lawyer. Helen starts a new job, and when her employer is found dead, all the (circumstantial) evidence points at her. She is put on trial for murder, and her husband defends her. He thinks she is lying again when she says she didn't do it, and insists she plead that she did, but in self defense. Charlie, a shady, odd character who may or may not know something about what really happened, hangs around the courtroom and jail making rude comments and noises. After Helen is acquitted, he tries to blackmail them.
Genre: Comedy
Director: Wesley Ruggles
Stars: Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray, John Barrymore
Coby's rating:
The Cowboy and the Lady (1938)
Plot: When a beautiful socialite masquerades as a maid, she becomes involved with an unpretentious, plain-spoken cowboy who's unaware of her true identity.
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Romance
Director: H.C. Potter
Stars: Gary Cooper, Merle Oberon, Patsy Kelly
Coby's rating:
Plot: A spoiled heiress, running away from her family, is helped by a man who's actually a reporter looking for a story.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Frank Capra
Stars: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly
Coby's rating:
Bell, Book and Candle (1958)
Plot: A modern-day witch likes her neighbor but despises his fiancee, so she enchants him to love her instead... only to fall in love with him for real.
Genre: Comedy | Romance | Fantasy
Director: Richard Quine
Stars: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon
Coby's rating:
My Man Godfrey (1936)
Plot: A scatterbrained socialite hires a vagrant as a family butler...but there's more to Godfrey than meets the eye.
Genre: Romance | Comedy
Director: Gregory La Cava
Stars: William Powell, Carole Lombard, Alice Brady
Coby's rating:
Plot: Ellen McNulty leaves her New Jersey hamburger stand and heads west to pay a surprise visit to her son and his new bride. When Ellen arrives, her daughter-in-law mistakes her for the maid she has hired for a big party they are throwing. Rather than cause any embarrassment, Ellen goes along with the charade, which leads to many complications.
Genre: Comedy
Director: Mitchell Leisen
Stars: Gene Tierney, John Lund, Miriam Hopkins
Coby's rating:
Vivacious Lady (1938)
Plot: On a quick trip to the city, young university professor Peter Morgan falls in love with nightclub performer Francey Brent and marries her after a whirlwind romance. But when he goes back home, he can't bring himself to tell his conservative, ultra-respected family about it.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: George Stevens
Stars: Ginger Rogers, James Stewart, James Ellison
Coby's rating:
We Were Dancing (1942)
Plot: Two titled aristocrats support themselves by being professional house guests in the homes of star-struck American nouveau riche.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Stars: Norma Shearer, Melvyn Douglas, Gail Patrick
Plot: Quick-tempered but likable Biff grimes falls big for beautiful Virginia Brush, but he's not the only young man in the neighborhood who's smitten.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Raoul Walsh
Stars: James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth
Coby's rating:
The Heavenly Body (1944)
Plot: The beautiful wife of a tweedy astronomer becomes convinced that her astrologer's prediction of a new dream man in her life will come true.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Alexander Hall
Stars: William Powell, Hedy Lamarr, James Craig
Coby's rating:
Plot: Indecisive heiress Dee Dee Dillwood is pushed into marrying her sixth fiancรฉe, but unable to face the wedding night, she flees into the adjacent hotel room of commercial pilot Marvin Payne, who just wants to sleep. Somehow, she persuades him to take her to California. Her fellow passengers include a chimpanzee, a corpse (in a coffin), an absconding embezzler, and two smoochy newlyweds. Can love be far behind?
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: H.C. Potter
Stars: Joan Fontaine, James Stewart, Eddie Albert
Coby's rating:
Plot: TV writer Elliott Nash buries a blackmailer under the new gazebo in his suburban backyard. But the nervous man can't let the body rest there.
Genre: Comedy | Crime
Director: George Marshall
Stars: Glenn Ford, Debbie Reynolds, Carl Reiner
Coby's rating:
Plot: When two musicians witness a mob hit, they flee the state in an all female band disguised as women, but further complications set in.
Genre: Comedy
Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon
Coby's rating:
Plot: Cass Brown is about to marry for the second time; his first marriage, to Isabel, was annulled. But when he discovers that Isabel just had their baby, Cass kidnaps the infant to keep her from being adopted. Isabel's parents hunt for the child and discover that Cass and Isabel are still hopelessly in love.
Genre: Comedy
Director: Sam Wood
Stars: Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Frank Morgan
Coby's rating:
Shall We Dance (1937)
Plot: A budding romance between a ballet master and a tapdancer becomes complicated when rumours surface that they're already married.
Genre: Comedy | Musical | Romance
Director: Mark Sandrich
Stars: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton
Plot: Amateur plumber Cluny Brown gets sent off by her uncle to work as a servant at an English country estate. While there, she becomes friendly with Adam Belinski, a charming Czech refugee. She also becomes interested in a dull shopkeeper named Mr. Wilson. Belinski soon falls in love with Cluny and tries to keep her from marrying Wilson.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Stars: Charles Boyer, Jennifer Jones, Peter Lawford
Coby's rating:
Plot: English dancehall actress Julia Packett hasn't seen her daughter since Susan was a few months old, having given her up to be raised by her respectable and wealthy father William (whom Julia never divorced.) When she gets an invitation to her daughter's wedding, she "borrows" some money from a male friend and heads off to the south of France for the nuptuals. While there she manages to establish a mother-daughter relationship, get another man to provide her with a lot of money, provoke her mother-in-law's ire, string along a potential husband and his mother, and rekindle the spark in William, all within a day or two.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Jack Conway
Stars: Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Elizabeth Taylor
Coby's rating:
Room for One More (1952)
Plot: A fairly well-to-do family takes in 2 troubled orphans since no one else will take them.
Genre: Comedy
Director: Norman Taurog
Stars: Cary Grant, Betsy Drake, Lurene Tuttle
Coby's rating:
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Plot: Two employees at a gift shop can barely stand one another, without realizing that they're falling in love through the post as each other's anonymous pen pal.
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Romance
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Stars: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Frank Morgan
Coby's rating:
Plot: Divorce lawyer Everard Logan thinks the woman who spent the night in his hotel room is the erring wife of his new client.
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Romance
Director: Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard
Stars: Merle Oberon, Laurence Olivier, Binnie Barnes
Pygmalion (1938)
Plot: Shaw's play in which a Victorian dialect expert bets that he can teach a lower-class girl to speak proper English and thus be taken for a lady.
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Romance
Director: Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard
Stars: Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Wilfrid Lawson
Plot: A boardinghouse full of aspiring actresses and their ambitions, dreams and disappointments.
Genre: Comedy | Drama
Director: Gregory La Cava
Stars: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou
Coby's rating:
Plot: An American dancer comes to Britain and falls for a model whom he initially annoyed, but she mistakes him for his goofy producer.
Genre: Comedy | Musical | Romance
Director: Mark Sandrich
Stars: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton
Plot: An American reporter smuggling news out of Soviet Moscow is blackmailed into helping a beautiful Communist leave the country.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: King Vidor
Stars: Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Oskar Homolka
Coby's rating:
Plot: Bold, eccentric Broadway performer Lisa Madden befuddles her handlers by coming home with a baby she picked up on the street. She wants to keep the baby but has to find a husband to make adoption viable. Why not her new obstetrician Dr. McBain? She offers him help with his research on rabbits in exchange for marriage - and he accepts. The marriage of convenience turns into a marriage of real love. When Dr. McBain's ex-wife comes looking for money, Lisa suspects something and leaves New York. However, a serious illness with the baby brings them together again as McBain operates to try and save the baby's life.
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Romance
Director: Mitchell Leisen
Stars: Marlene Dietrich, Fred MacMurray, Aline MacMahon
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
Plot: Longfellow Deeds, a simple-hearted Vermont tuba player, inherits a fortune and has to contend with opportunist city slickers.
Genre: Comedy | Drama
Director: Frank Capra
Stars: Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, George Bancroft
Coby's rating:
It's a Wonderful World (1939)
Plot: Detective Guy Johnson's client, Willie Heywood is framed for murder and while Guy hides him so he can catch the real killer, both of them are nabbed by the police, tried, convicted and sentenced to jail -- Guy for a year, Willie to be executed. On the way to jail Guy comes across a clue and escapes from the police...
Genre: Crime | Comedy | Romance
Director: W.S. Van Dyke
Stars: Claudette Colbert, James Stewart, Guy Kibbee
Coby's rating:
Plot: The accidental mix up of four identical plaid overnight bags leads to a series of increasingly wild and wacky situations.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Peter Bogdanovich
Stars: Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Madeline Kahn
Million Dollar Legs (1932) (1932)
Plot: A small country on the verge of bankruptcy is persuaded to enter the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics as a means of raising money. Either a masterpiece of absurdity or a triumph of satire, depending on your mood, but it's quite possibly the funniest movie ever made, and becomes even funnier with subsequent viewings.
Genre: Comedy | Sport
Director: Edward F. Cline
Stars: Jack Oakie, W.C. Fields, Andy Clyde
Follow the Fleet (1936)
Plot: A Navy sailor tries to rekindle a romance with the woman he loves while on liberty in San Francisco.
Genre: Comedy | Musical | Romance
Director: Mark Sandrich
Stars: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Randolph Scott
Alice Adams (1935)
Plot: The misadventures of two social-climbing women in small town America.
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Romance
Director: George Stevens
Stars: Katharine Hepburn, Fred MacMurray, Fred Stone
Coby's rating:
The Dude Goes West (1948)
Plot: Eastern gunsmith Daniel Bone goes out west to ply his trade, encounters a girl searching for the murderer of her father.
Genre: Comedy | Western
Director: Richard Thorpe
Stars: Eddie Albert, Gale Storm, James Gleason
That Funny Feeling (1965)
Plot: Joan Howell, a young and pretty maid-for-hire, meets and begins dating wealthy New York City businessman Tom Milford. Embarrassed about bringing him back to her tiny apartment that she shares with her roommate Audrey, Joan brings Tom over to a fancy apartment that she cleans on a daily basis not knowing that it's his place. Tom plays along with the charade despite not knowing who Joan really is, while she tries to tidy up Tom's place not knowing who he really is.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Richard Thorpe
Stars: Sandra Dee, Bobby Darin, Donald O'Connor
Coby's rating:
Plot: A wily slave must unite a virgin courtesan and his young smitten master to earn his freedom.
Genre: Comedy | Musical
Director: Richard Lester
Stars: Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Buster Keaton
Along Came Jones (1945)
Plot: A good-natured saddle tramp and his sidekick mistaken for a ruthless outlaw with a price on his head and his sidekick.
Genre: Comedy | Romance | Western
Director: Stuart Heisler
Stars: Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, William Demarest
Coby's rating:
Every Girl Should Be Married (1948)
Plot: Anabel Sims is determined to find the perfect husband. She thinks she's found her man in Madison Brown, a handsome pediatrician. She then prepares an elaborate scheme to trap him into marriage.
Genre: Comedy
Director: Don Hartman
Stars: Cary Grant, Franchot Tone, Diana Lynn
Coby's rating:
Plot: A dying tycoon gives million-dollar windfalls to eight people picked from the city directory.
Genre: Comedy | Drama
Director: James Cruze
Stars: Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, George Raft
The Seven Year Itch (1955)
Plot: When his family goes away for the summer, a so far faithful husband is tempted by a beautiful neighbor.
Genre: Comedy | Romance
Director: Billy Wilder
Stars: Marilyn Monroe, Tom Ewell, Evelyn Keyes
Coby's rating:
Plot: Tacey and Harry King are a suburban couple with three sons and a serious need of a babysitter. Tacey puts an ad in the paper for a live-in babysitter, and the ad is answered by Lynn Belvedere. But when she arrives, she turns out to be a man. And not just any man, but a most eccentric, outrageously forthright genius with seemingly a million careers and experiences behind him.
Genre: Comedy
Director: Walter Lang
Stars: Robert Young, Maureen O'Hara, Clifton Webb
Coby's rating:
Load more items (223 more in this list)
The screwball comedy is a subgenre of the comedy film genre. It has proven to be one of the most popular and enduring film genres. It first gained prominence in 1934 with It Happened One Night, and, although many film scholars would agree that its classic period ended sometime in the early 1940s, elements of the genre have persisted, or have been paid homage to, in contemporary film.
While there is no authoritative list of the defining characteristics of the screwball comedy genre, films considered to be definitive of the genre usually feature farcical situations, a combination of slapstick with fast-paced repartee, and a plot involving courtship and marriage or remarriage. The film critic Andrew Sarris has defined the screwball comedy as "a sex comedy without the sex."
The screwball comedy has close links with the theatrical genre of farce, and some comic plays are also described as screwball comedies. Many elements of the screwball genre can be traced back to such stage plays as Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream and Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Other genres with which screwball comedy is associated include slapstick, situation comedy, and romantic comedy.
Added to
13 votes
Film and TV Genres
(86 lists)list by Mr. Saturn
Published 11 years, 5 months ago
1 comment
People who voted for this also voted for
Top 50 of the 1930's
Favorite William Wyler Movies
1979 : My Favorite Horror Films
June Allyson's Comedies
June Allyson's Musicals And Musical Comedies
Van Halen, Remixed!
Anautix' Film Noir Collection
Vampires Movies (Best of the Best)
1968 : My Favorite Horror Films
Yvonne De Carlo's Comedies
swimming
Film Diary of 2023
Cigarette Cards: Boats of the World (1912)
Georg Wilhelm Pabst. His films
1960 : My Favorite Horror Films
More lists from Coby
2019 Films - Best to Worst
[Actor] Clive Owen Films: Best to Worst
Watched in 2020
[Actor] Cary Grant Films: Best to Worst
Watched in 2016
2018 Films: Best to Worst
[Actor] James Stewart Films: Best to Worst