Class,
Language, and American Film Comedy
Christopher
Beach
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
£45.00, 241 pages, ISBN 0-521-80749-2 (hardback)
£15.00, 241 pages, ISBN 0-521-00209-5 (paperback)
Nicolas Magenham
Université de Paris X - Nanterre
Watching
any Woody Allen comedy or TV sitcom is enough to realize that language
is one of the most significant elements of sound comedy. In his new
book, Christopher Beach analyzes language in American film comedy
from the late 1920s to the present, emphasizing the relationships
between speech acts and class issues.
In chapter I, Beach examines what might seem to be a hackneyed topic
as regards language in cinema, but which is in fact curiously not
so common: Lubitsch's dialogue (here, in Trouble in Paradise,
1932). The originality comes from the fact that by dint of praising
only the visual aspect of Lubitsch's films, some critics forget that
his witty and double-entendre-ridden dialogue is brilliant and worth
listening to carefully. Although Beach is attracted to the sophistication
of the Austrian director's writing, he also argues that it is socially
conservative: the film's artificial dialogue contributes to its "overall
sense of stylistic decorum, and the fact that it fails to challenge
the social order in any profound sense", which "lead[s]
us to read it as ideologically conservative, especially within the
context of Depression-era America". The absence of social interest
in Trouble in Paradise in such a socioeconomic context may
be meaningful regarding Lubitsch's ideas about society, but it could
be meaningless too. So it would be hasty to deduce from this silence
that Lubitsch's vision is conservative in this film; I for one would
say that, just as Woody Allen in his recent films, he has simply other
(formal) interests.
It could have been easy for Beach to equate the language issue with
dialogue only (that is, the characters' lines as they appear in the
screenplay), but fortunately, he is also interested in the way the
actors tell the lines, in their intonations, accents and other sounds.
His pages on the Marx Brothers exemplify this approach. For instance,
he alludes to Groucho's "grating voice" or Chico's "non
sequiturs, fragments, and malapropisms". Then, Beach draws interesting
parallels between the language of the trio and their image. For him,
"each of the Brothers is associated with a highly iconographic
physical appearance that finds its verbal accompaniment in a particularized
style of speech".
With Harpo Marx, Christopher Beach has to study the absence of speech
too. In many westerns, male protagonists are often characterized by
their silence (Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's films, for example).
In psychoanalysis, the reticence with language reinforces the powerful
image of the self, since language creates a symbolic castration, and
so threatens the image of the self as omnipotent (see Steve Neal,
"Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream
Cinema", Screen, 24:6 (Nov-Dec 1983), pp.5-8). However,
contrary to Eastwood's silence, Harpo's silence cannot be connected
with a display of power. As Beach points out, Harpo is not really
reticent with language, it is just impossible for him to speak because
of a "socioeconomic and mental impoverishment". Furthermore,
Harpo's silence and visual gags are also a way of going back to an
earlier (film) era. I agree with Beach when he speaks of a "reversal
of film history", but I am less enthusiastic when he writes that
in this reversal of film history, "we can perhaps read a desire
to turn back the clock to an earlier and happy time, a time before
the market crash and the onset of greater class antagonisms created
troubles in paradises". In the earlier time he refers to, America
was a more pleasant place to live in than in the 1930s, but it was
far from being a "paradise". In the 1920s, the US experienced
an economic expansion, but Big Business triumphed and there was a
strong renewal of conservatism.
In the chapter on 1930s romantic comedy, Beach purports to link class
issues to gender and sexuality, taking as examples a rarely discussed
film called The Girl from Missouri (Jack Conway, 1934), and
above all, Mitchell Leisen's Easy Living (1937). The latter
introduces a female worker (played by Jean Arthur) who turns into
a female consumer in the second half of the film. And as such, she
embodies the female shopper stereotype advocated by dominant ideology
in order to keep women in the private sphere. Furthermore she is a
good example of the contradictory gender roles that women were ascribed
to in the 1930s, when "American culture […] saw women as
both erotic and pure, as both the agents of excessive consumption
and the household regulators of consumer desire".
When it comes to postwar comedies, in chapter 5, Beach argues that
at the time, "Americans wanted more than ever to believe in the
myth of a socially homogeneous and virtually classless society, and
Hollywood was happy to oblige them in this wish". During World
War II, a class conflict would have been regarded as subversive and
un-American, and afterwards, a class consensus was still sought in
order to destroy the threat of communism during the Cold War. Thus,
unlike screwball comedies of the 1930s, 1950s comedies are globally
distinguished by an absence of social mobility. Beach even challenges
the idea that Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
deals with women who want to cross class barriers: "it is not
so much class status that Lorelei [Marilyn Monroe] is seeking as money,
or, to be more precise, the materialized form of money as diamonds".
In other words, Lorelei prefers the economic capital (diamonds) rather
than the cultural capital (like, for example, and according to the
well-known song of the film, "a kiss on the hand"). Therefore,
the film conforms to the myth of a classless society that the US wanted
to believe in during the war and postwar eras. Nevertheless, referring
only to the class issue, Beach gives the impression that Hawks's film
is a mere conformist film, which is not the case if analyzed from
a feminist point of view. Listening to the constructionist "Diamonds
Are a Girl's Best Friend" is enough to understand that the film
has a progressive flavor too.
On top of all the films that I have alluded to, Beach's book also
contains good pages on Frank Capra's social critiques (which was inevitable),
on comedies by Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks dating back to the
early 1940s, and on Frank Tashlin's satires. There are also two appealing
chapters on contemporary comedies, in which Woody Allen and the Coen
brothers are prominently featured. The corpus is well-balanced:
classic comedies and less known or underrated comedies (from Billy
Wilder's The Apartment to Ben Stiller's The Cable Guy)
are equally treated. And if Class, Language, and American Comedy
lacks some important and/or successful titles—there is no mention
of Blake Edwards's films, for instance—Beach's book nevertheless
constitutes an original approach to comedy.
