Screwball Comedy

Mr. & Mrs. Smith - Loan from Seymour Library

Alfred Hitchcock’s sole screwball comedy, from 1941, reels of erotic horror. The handsome and prosperous Smiths, David (Robert Montgomery) and Ann (Carole Lombard), lock themselves in a bedroom for three days to try to solve a squabble. The sex seems to have gone out of their three-year marriage, but, when David learns that a legal loophole has rendered their union null and void, he becomes aroused by the prospect of reseducing the newly coy and virginal Miss Ann. Instead, she puts him through the hell of another courtship. Latent erotic frenzy emerges in diabolical details --- the phallic neck of a champagne bottle that David points at his prey, hte childless Ann’s new job at a department store’s layette counter. Meanwhile, David spirals downward into degradation as Ann sparks his jealousy by dating his gallant, athletic law partner (Gene Raymond). All ends up artificially well, but the comedy foreshadows the sexual gamesmanship of “Vertigo” as well as the metaphysical terror of “The Wrong Man” and “North by Northwest,” in which a person is expelled from his own life by a hiccup of fate. (The New Yorker, March 3, 2014)