Steve Vineberg, High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humour from the 1920s to the Present.

Forsyth, Scott

Steve Vineberg, High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humour from the 1920s to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield 2005)

THIS BOOK provides a concise, accessible, and entertaining critical tour through some of the most beloved and celebrated of Hollywood films. The tight focus of this genre study is on those comedies of the upper classes filled with charming characters, sharp banter, and delightfully romantic, if often bittersweet, resolutions.

Vineberg's favoured sub-genre, high comedy, or interchangeably comedy of manners, is rooted in the English and French theatre, from Congreve and Sheridan to Marivaux, "modernized" by Wilde and Coward. Vineberg is interested in how this aristocratic lineage interacts with the democratic and egalitarian ideologies of America, and with Hollywood's inveterate populism, to produce the cinematic variations he follows from the twenties to the contemporary.

Vinberg begins by distinguishing Hollywood's high comedy from all its other comic traditions--including romantic, burlesque, hard-boiled, situation, sentimental, parody, satire, farce, and black comedy. This exhaustive list is collected by example--for burlesque, the Keystone Cops to the Farrelly Brothers; for parody, the benign spoofs of the Austin Powers series--to tell us what high comedy is not.

Then, Vineberg provides high comedy with a much more elaborate set of fourteen conventions that define it over the decades, luxuriously familiar to experienced Hollywood watchers. These are films set among the rich--if no longer the literal aristocracy of Europe, an elite of money--and the expected costumes, settings, objects, and elaborate social rules of the wealthy. We expect a special style among the elite, above all "extraordinary conversation"--the sparkling wit, spontaneity, and vitality of these golden people. He is thrilled by the theatrically descended acting styles that embody this high style. This is the charm of a liberal world with the comic liberation of alcohol and worldly appreciation of the erotic. The plot and character conventions become thematic as well; such films resolve in conservative and optimistic fashion, in a charmingly make-believe status quo. Just as important for Vineberg, they often combine their light touch with melancholic profundity. This elaborate melange of style and themes allows a rather artificial categorization of films that are in or out of consideration--this judgement by genre definition can be annoying--but Vineberg is supple enough to see that what he cherishes in the high comic has migrated into other kinds of comedies and even further afield across Hollywood history.

Vineberg begins his historical chronicle in the twenties and thirties. Hollywood creates a vision of Europe in many adaptations of European plays: "Paris, Vienna, and Budapest settings became metaphors for elegance, exoticism, magic." It is a fantasy that sells in America and back in Europe. Many of these silent comedies, talkies, and even musical operettas, engaged the steady stream of European directors, writers, and actors who were emigrating to California from the mid-twenties on, an importation and integration of foreign artistry that continues throughout Hollywood history. Vineberg memorializes this classic Hollywood: the early American performances of Dietrich, or the masterful comedies of Lubitsch--The Merry Widow, Trouble in Paradise, The Shop around the Corner.

The heart of the book explains the particularly American style of high comedy that develops in the thirties. This importation is from Broadway, especially the plays of Philip Barry. Vineberg presents loving evocations of the most famous films--The Philadelphia Story and Holiday--and the sublime performances of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. This is entertaining criticism, though Vineberg skates over long-time feminist objections to the ways in which matrimonial resolutions tame Hepburn's feisty heroine. It would also have been interesting to square the films' class conservatism with the politics of the screenwriter, well-known Communist Donald Ogden Stewart.

The most interesting sections of the book focus on films not usually considered comic. Vineberg uses high comic conventions to explore class in classic dramas--The Magnificent Ambersons, The Letter, The Heiress, Dodsworth. Vineberg even firmly declares that "there were no pure high comedies" made in Hollywood from 1940 to 1969. But he follows the high comic into thrillers, film noir, and melodrama. He has original takes on diverse favourites: Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Caught and the melodramas about Hollywood, The Bad and The Beautiful, A Star is Bom, Sunset Boulevard.

Like many film historians, Vineberg considers the late sixties and early seventies to be a new golden age for Hollywood. With little to say about why this might be, Vineberg delights in smart, young directors who re-invent the comedy of manners--often refiguring the aristocracy as "hip" or media celebrities--in a period filled with memorable hits. Vineberg is impressed with the gentle satires of Paul Mazursky--Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Alex in Wonderland, Blume in Love. He compares Shampoo to Renoir's Rules of the Game to underline the painful melancholy that runs through all these comedies. But, to Vineberg, the modern master of high comedy is Robert Altman and Nashville its finest American accomplishment. These are some of the very few high comedies Vineberg considers to have a political edge, albeit darkly pessimistic.

The contemporary examples of high comedy Vineberg finds are few and far between. Later work by Mazursky and Altman--Down and Out in Beverly Hills, The Player, Gosford Park--and a few brilliant singular films, foregrounded against the Hollywood fodder by his generic lens--The Ice Age, Six Degrees of Separation--are highlighted.

The limitations of this book flow from its narrowly defined ambition. Vineberg offers a particular kind of film scholarship, genre criticism, the most popular reading of film for both makers and audience. This gives the book vitality: the provocation of the reader--what, not a word about Bringing Up Baby!? However, the evaluation of genre films and the judgement of performance that is important to Vineberg's emphasis on style are notoriously slippery and populist discourses and the book often becomes mere plot reprise, then magisterial judgment in a "best of ..." ranking, more tasting than analysis.

Similarly, Vineberg avoids the obscurantist jargon of Theory that has plagued film studies for years but uses a casual under-theorized approach. Most important, Vineberg proposes no serious definition of class--sociological, historical, or political--so the study remains on the level of the films--impressions, nuance, style, and status--with no sense of actual class position, or class as relationship, or change in class structure. Scholarship on class and film has recently returned to film studies in important ways: the representation of the working class, the labour and politics of film creators themselves, the intersection with race and gender. Vineberg's focus on the upper class in these comedies is welcome but narrow; we are shown that the films reflect class, and ideals of class, in America and that class becomes a spectacle for pleasurable consumption. Bur the argument remains undeveloped.

Finally, the book rushes through eight decades bur there is little sense of historical periodization or causation. (I pondered the announcement that "the war years coarsened the sensibility of Hollywood movies" for a long time.) In recent work, film historians have considerably widened the study of film with archival research and a deeper contextualization in both political economy and media culture. Vineberg brings theatre back into our understanding of Hollywood but provides a gloss, not a film history.

This is a book rather like the comedies it celebrates--witty and graceful, wearing its erudite roots in theatre history lightly, but leaving us with a sharp sense there is something to explore more deeply.

Scott Forsyth

York University