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The Balance of Satire and Romance in the Hollywood Romantic Comedies of

Lubitsch, Wilder and the Coen Brothers

Introduction

Although kept on a tight rein by their studios, the most skilful Hollywood auteurs used
and abused generic conventions to satirise the abiding ideologies and ethics of their
studio and their country. It is well documented how film-noir and gangster films show
the evil inherent in the American Dream when it is taken to its logical conclusion. As
Deleuze (1983: 144) defines them, the two sides of the American Dream are, “a
nation-milieu, melting pot and fusion of all minorities” from which arises a great
leader who “knows how to respond to the challenges of the milieu as to the difficulties
of a situation”. In noir and the gangster film, exemplified in the work of directors like
Wilder and Hawks, the great leader manipulates the milieu through crime, but soon
finds that the deceit turns in on itself and the milieu destroys the leader. With such
“tragic” endings “the American cinema had the means to save its dream by passing
through nightmares” (Deleuze, 1983: 145).
Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to demonstrate that through romantic
comedy, directors such as Hawks and Wilder demonstrate how the American Dream
and its capitalism are paradoxical, without the recourse to tragedy. They show that
leaders cannot arise from the milieu unless it is through crime, immorality or
internecine opportunism. The lightness of the plot and the jokes expected in the
genre are teasingly satiric, and an opportune space for subversion.
As well as showing what people really require from society, but are seldom
offered, the function of romance in these films is often to illustrate how the
conservative ideology actively opposes its treasured institutions of heterosexual
marriage and fidelity if capitalistic success is to be sought. As Babington and Evans
(1989: vi) say, romantic comedy is the “more optimistic sister” of melodrama, and it is
the expectation of happy endings, and the general focus on heterosexual
consummation, that distracts viewers from the films’ bleak suggestions about society.
As Sikov (1994: 86) says of Hawks and Wilder, genre frustration is cultural
frustration, and the masters of romantic comedy have been wily in employing their
moral relativism, attacking the system, by using the system.
Unfortunately, constraints on space do not permit me to consider the
contributions of Sturges and Hawks to the genre and this question, and I will instead

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be focusing on Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder and Joel and Ethan Coen1 because the
seven decades that pass here illustrate the import of the genre as a whole, and their
approaches to the genre are hereditary, and highly satirical.
We will see that Lubitsch melts predetermined spaces and boundaries with a
seductive and charming wit that dissolves the state and affirms the self. In the finest
capitalist tradition, he uses his charisma to sell the studios films sceptical of social
conventions. Wilder, his disciple, uses romantic comedy aggressively, showing that
the nightmare of crime films is actually an expression of the mundane reality.
Moreover, Wilder’s finest jokes are at the expense of identity; for Wilder, the melting
pot takes away its ingredients’ forms and flavours.
Finally, the Coen Brothers draw on their romantic comedy history to play
romance and satire against one another directly in a shroud of artificiality, showing
that only if the real world were determined by the convention of the happy ending
solution would Wilder and Lubitsch be wrong in their cynicism. Ultimately there is no
escape from society, even for lovers, but romantic comedies are fairytales and
parables designed to help us cope a little better, to distract and delight.

Lubitsch and the Power of Seduction

As a German émigré, the notion of nation appeared to appeal little to Lubitsch. He

would often make his films in Paris, Paramount in preference to Paris, France, or, as
in The Merry Widow (1934), he would use a fictitious country such as Marshovia. To
make this ironic, his Marshovian hero would be Maurice Chevalier, the Parisian, who
would then be sent to a Paris populated by American actors. It seems that Lubitsch
preferred imaginary spaces to real ones (Hake, 1992: 72).
The film Trouble in Paradise (1932) does not refer to a place either. The song
that accompanies the opening credits favours the state of mind of love and romance
to “a garden filled with flowers”, and this is what we soon find in our protagonists Lily
and Gaston. United through their shared passion for thievery (which Paul (1983: 57-
58) reads as a metaphor for sex), perhaps because only amongst thieves may a
crook share the intimacy of an authentic identity (Henry, 2001: 83), Lily and Gaston
fall passionately in love, and for two years it seems that they are in paradise.
They fancy their chances at stealing from Madame Colet, the wealthy
inheritor of a perfume company, by working as her personal staff. We are introduced

1
Who, with The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) also make a great contribution to film-noir.

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to Colet’s company through a radio advertisement insisting that, “it’s not how you
look, it’s how you smell”. As Paul (1983: 46) suggests, Colet’s company is involved
with the disguising of decay. It is comparable to an early scene in which a Venetian
trash collector sings O Sole Mio in perfect tenor. Lubitsch’s conflates the concept of
decadence throughout. Decadence is the aesthetic movement of refined artifice,
producing objects flamboyant enough to cover over the decay in society. This is
embodied in characters’ expensive tastes (Colet buys a handbag for $125,000), and
the movie’s lavish mise-en-scene. With Eisensteinian dialecticism, Lubitsch provides
us with a montage during the radio commercial. Garish neon advertisements are
contrasted with shots of factory workers; although this communist bias is neutralised
later when Gaston ridicules a self-righteous Bolshevik.
Crucially however, decadence assumes a prior and dogmatic standard of
aesthetics and morality, and it is this that Lubitsch’s florid frames question. Gaston,
the crook, is portrayed as charming, infallible – and not amusing unless it is he who is
ridiculing someone. Lubitsch and Gaston poke fun at all members of “honest” society
through him: the naivety of the wealthy Colet, the flaccid incapacity of her suitors,
and the avarice of her company’s directors. Members of the working class are also
mocked. A waiter who parrots Gaston’s poetic musings as though he were ordering a
cocktail, a butler who continually mumbles when alone, and two wipe-montages of
“Yes, Madame” servants portray a distinctly Bergsonian humour (Kolakowski, 1985:
66) by appearing to be mechanical and lifeless. We are also made to wonder how the
board of directors, in wishing to deprive the workers of wages and embezzling Colet’s
finances, differ from Gaston and Lily who rob only the rich and foolish.
The melodrama inserts itself into this satire when it becomes clear that
Gaston has fallen in love with Colet. As Henry (2001: 83) suggests, the two have
become “partners in consumption” and are drawn to one another through their mutual
appreciation of fine things; their embrace is captured in silhouette on the bed. Gaston
becomes tempted by the asylum paradise of Colet’s mansion, so removed from the
decay outside in the world of the Great Depression (or the “Times Like These”).
As it is, in finally choosing to leave with Lily, Gaston decides that although
paradise could be, in Paul’s (1983: 67) words, “a kind of safe harbour that leads
away from the demands of the outside world”, for him and Lily it is “a kind of oblivion
that, by denying society, denies all other definitions of self”. He adds (2001: 68) that,
although they are more benign than company directors, society offers these criminals
no space, no beds in which to lie. Instead, the Trouble in Paradise ends with them

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together in transit, transgressing space and time, heading to nowhere. It is only

outside of society that true love and identity can really be affirmed.
It is a happy ending for the criminals in every respect – they have each other,
and they robbed Colet successfully – and Paul suggests (2001: 51) that this is the
only such Hollywood film where such flagrant criminals are not at all punished. After
all, if this were a crime film Gaston and Lily would be dead! This passed most critics
by; Hake (1992: 183) suggests they were “seduced by the film’s light-hearted story”,
just as the characters in it were seduced by Gaston’s easy charm. When one accepts
that, in the film, “applying the laws of capitalism Gaston undermines the system form
within” (Hake, 1992: 181), Lubitsch and Gaston appear to be playing the same game.
Both seek refuge from society to pursue their passions, but understand society well
enough to manipulate it to their advantage. This instructs us that the romantic
comedy genre smoothly manipulates capitalism (demonstrated by the fact that
Lubitsch, Wilder and the Coens produce(d) their own films) so as to plot its escape
from it for an interstice of iconoclastic fantasy.
For Ninotchka (1939), the onset of war and the influence of Billy Wilder on the
script forced Lubitsch out from under his studio to state that paradise should not be
tainted by nation and its specious manipulation of peoples’ beliefs. Henry (2001: 78)
describes both men as Kleistians, moral relativists who believe in the fluidity of
personal identity and although Ninotchka is an outright political satire exploring both
communism and capitalism, the title informs us that this is a film that explores the
development of personal identity. In communism this is inhibited in everyone,
whereas in capitalism it is excessive in the few who escape the milieu, depriving
them of empathy, and therefore, love.
Ninotchka begins with three Muscovites arriving in Paris to sell a jewel. They
are having little success however, due to Count Leon, who is helping his “lover”, the
exiled czarist Swana to reclaim it. Leon charms and seduces the envoys with, not
legal argument, but the capitalist luxuries of Paris. Envoy extraordinary Ninotchka
arrives to help them. She makes us laugh with the same Bergsonian automatism
(Hopp, 2003: 25) as the Paradise proletariat; her apparent inability to feel and her
deadpan delivery of understatements and rhetoric makes her seem inhuman.
Ninotchka is individuated, however by misty lens close-ups, suggesting that Lubitsch
can see past the machine into a human’s eyes. Leon promptly follows suit and
attempts to seduce her.

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The two fall in love by making a concession to one another. Ninotchka must
engage in the frivolous (and characteristically human) act of laughter, whilst Leon
must relinquish his aristocratic pretensions by falling over – itself a Bergsonian
attitude as he who falls must submit himself to natural laws (Kolakowski, 1985: 67) –
in, of all places, a workers’ bistro. He too must become a ridiculous cog in the
mechanisms of society, but for Ninotchka to laugh, she must demonstrate humanity.
Ninotchka’s satire is similarly egalitarian. One-liners regarding capitalism:
“They make millions by taking loss after loss”, vie with those regarding communism:
“I’ve been fascinated by your Five Year Plan for the last 15 years”. Just as Leon
begins reading Marx, his butler criticises him freely for doing so. When Ninotchka
asks a porter if he regards his position as social injustice, he wryly rejoins: “It
depends on the tip”.
Paris seems a highly appropriate setting for Ninotchka. As Sinyard and
Turner (1979: 8) say, it is a city for people who do not belong anywhere. Again
Lubitsch is breaking down space, but France, with its emphasis on the Cartesian
assertion of the self, is ideal for developing ones identity. This is in contrast to
Moscow, where a shot shows Ninotchka marching, although the conformity of
appearance of those marching means we cannot identify her.
To win Leon back, Swana blackmails Ninotchka, and to save Russia, she
returns home. Leon attempts to follow her but is refused a visa because he is a
count. Here, the discrimination against someone because they are wealthy seems
cruelly ironic. Love finds its way through to Ninotchka however in the form of a
censored letter. Yet this is crucial, as the state’s censoring of the letter’s content
cannot dim its basic sentiment.
It is Leon’s charm that finally saves Ninotchka and their love, because he
convinces the envoys to cause trouble in Constantinople, forcing her to come over
and allowing him to convince her. He gives her laughter and identity, whereas her
sense of equality offers him the closeness he lacked in the high society that had him
apathetically “loving” Swana, whose photograph we see him hide in a drawer. What
is the point of countries with no people in them, or ideologies that do not serve
anyone? In different ways, both capitalism and communism stifle the individuality of
the majority, and these must be reclaimed through loving and laughing.

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Wilder’s Aggressive Use of the Genre

Again on the theme of developing selfhood, The Apartment (Wilder, 1960) is

about accountant Bud Baxter’s attempts to become a mensch. The film opens with
crane shots over New York’s skyscrapers. This opening, narrated by Baxter (Jack
Lemmon), is a monologue focusing on statistics, such as that there are eight million
working in the buildings, none of whom he knows as anything other than a number.
We see his desk, surrounded by thousands of other desks. For this Wilder took his
inspiration from the office in Lubitsch’s short “The Clerk” (1932) and both films seem
to be influenced by Kafka’s bureaucratic satire The Trial2 (1925). Wilder used dwarf
actors and special furniture3 to increase the sense that this office could engulf life and
individuality. We then learn that Baxter’s superiors threaten him with dismissal if he
does not allow them to use his apartment for their philandering, and offer him the
promise of promotion as a reward. He admits that because of this, and not due to any
amount of ambition, he stays at the office until late at night.
For who or what will Baxter’s professional success be for? The title and
opening sequence explain that he is nothing but someone who dwells within a
building, like the eight million in the skyscrapers. Dwarfed by the cityscape, Baxter
invents friends to explain why he is waiting outside for his apartment to be vacated,
so he can eat a T.V. dinner and be force fed advertisements. Sinyard and Turner
(1979: 160) speak of the “invasion of commercialism into people’s lives at every
level”. Yet, our Lubitsch films show that there is no satiety to be found in objects, if
not shared with a loved one who knows you authentically. Baxter’s progression is
meaningless, and bears the hallmarks of Kafka’s (1964: 230) hatred of bureaucratic
work: “my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me
completely”. This happens physically, as Baxter contracts a cold waiting outside in
the New York winter, and morally, as we see the people who are passed over in
favour of him. Although, as Madsen (1969: 121) suggests, the greatest satire here is
that Baxter appears to be “operating in the best American tradition of individual
initiative and enterprise”. Baxter will acquire and succeed, not through merit, but
through nepotism; he will not know why he bothered, and no one else will know that
he did.

2
Indeed, when Orson Welles realised The Trial on film (1962), the office again takes this
dehumanising form.
3
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0053604/trivia

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He would love to share his ill-gotten success with Fran, the elevator girl,
whom he knows only in terms of numbers and abstraction. Potter (2002: 127)
describes her “air of sadness” and it is hardly surprising. Her job is to effectively
spend all her time going nowhere, whilst big shots such as Baxter rise toward the
executive washroom. Moreover, she is in love with Baxter’s boss, Sheldrake, who
takes her to the apartment for their affairs, but refuses to leave his wife for her.
Wilder’s comedy takes a dark turn when Fran attempts suicide in the apartment.
Such darkness is here to justify a thinly veiled Marxism. Although there was a fine
balance in Ninotchka, the focus on Baxter’s corporation effectively owning his
apartment makes Marx and Engel’s (1888: 96) point that industry actively destroys
the property of the proletariat and takes it for its own. That the corporation uses the
property as a refuge for adultery equally supports their argument (100-101) that the
family is a means for keeping money in the hands of the rich, and that no bourgeois
is faithful; that is, there is no true love. Complicit in these affairs, Baxter must decay
morally as he is contributing to Fran’s suffering.
When Baxter realizes how foul it is to be like Sheldrake, he hands him back
the key to the executive washroom, quits his job, and claims to have become a
mensch. When Fran hears of his nobility she joins him at the apartment, interested in
forming a relationship. As Sinyard and Turner (1979: 161) say, the eight million New
Yorkers of the skyscrapers in the opening sequence become just two unemployed
lovers sharing a frame outside of society. This ending seems highly ambiguous in
terms of success as they are out of work. It therefore does not have the all round
narrative closure of a Hollywood comedy. Sinyard and Turner (1979: 164-165) worry
that the couple are doomed. This is an unwise concern. Wilder uses “The End” as the
end of the struggling, but only the most devoted Hollywood romantic would accept
that everyone must live happily ever after. If Woody Allen’s revisionist romance
Annie Hall (1977) is nervous due to the inevitable separation, its concluding montage
admits that it is not the end that matters, but the life-affirming pleasures that lie within
the striving. For Baxter, he is morally redeemed, and “The End” represents a new
beginning; but the world is unchanged, and he may well have to face it once again
some day. All that really matters is that he is not his apartment, or a statistic on a
payroll or census; he is Bud Baxter, both in his eyes, and those of his lover.
It is hardly surprising that many critics found the movie immoral (Henry, 2001:
158). This is incomparable however to the uproar that accompanied Wilder’s Kiss

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Me, Stupid (1964) - it was condemned by the Catholic Church Legion of Decency
(Madsen, 1969: 138).
The title is the film’s final line. Orville Spooner is Stupid, and his wife wants to
kiss him for it because, and this is apparent throughout, she loves him
unconditionally. Spooner believed, stupidly, that his beloved wife might leave him
because of his modest living teaching piano. He is encouraged by his song-writing
partner to con the entertainer Dino (Dean Martin) into buying his song, but to do this
he must get rid of his wife by hitting her, and then bring in a prostitute to sleep with
Dino.
Just like The Apartment, the film is shot in black-and-white, despite it being
set in the desert, which would usually favour a colour print, as in Westerns. The
monochrome, combined with film-noir lighting through Venetian blinds makes the
town of Climax, Nevada – a tantalising mid-point between Las Vegas and Hollywood
– seem imprisoning, menacing and seedy. The escape from the milieu requires, just
as in the previous film, immense amounts of deception to achieve social and
capitalistic success – apparently just so Spooner can retain his wife!
It must have shocked critics to find that the subversive, “criminal” elements in
a film purporting to be a light comedy were white, lovers of classical music and
growers of parsley. Its potent attack is on the desire to be a part of the lucrative
Hollywood/Las Vegas light entertainment and hollowness that Dino represents. In a
sense, it illustrates Wilder’s distance from Lubitsch by this point; the seductive charm
of capitalism makes people so stupid they hit their wives. Wilder uses genre
conventions aggressively here, with a plot so contrived as to offer a happy ending in
which Spooner gets his song sold, Dino gets laid with Mrs. Spooner, and the
prostitute has enough money to leave town. Sinyard and Turner (1979: 246) suggest
the film could have been called All’s Well That Ends Well, as at no point is
conventional morality here a hurdle in the way of success in society. Furthermore the
prostitute is the most sympathetic character; for Wilder there is no criticism, she is
“just another human being coping as best she can with life’s adversities” (Sinyard
and Turner, 1979: 248). Importantly however, with the infidelity here the marriage is
tarnished; the one thing Spooner wanted to avoid.
Wilder’s comedies fall into these two categories: those where immorality and
deceit reaps rewards but damage romance, and those where morality and honesty
consolidate a self but leaves it alienated from society and narrative closure. In Irma
la Douce (1963) the former is the case when Nestor (Lemmon), attempting to keep

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his prostitute girlfriend off the game, dresses up as an English Lord and pays her by
working at the “Stomach of Paris” while she sleeps. The double life takes its toll on
them, and only by pretending that he killed the Lord can he convince her to marry
him. After the marriage we see the Lord stalking the frame; it looks like a joke, but the
truth is that the marriage is already sullied by dishonesty. In Some Like It Hot (1959),
two musicians must dress in drag and move to Florida so as to avoid joining the body
count of a gangster film (which, as was said, is for Wilder the logical conclusion of the
American Dream), living as completely different people just to stay alive. Although
everyone has a lover by the end, it seems that they will remain on the run and on the
fringes of acceptable (heterosexual) society, transported in static two-person frames,
just like the end of Trouble in Paradise.
Sikov (1994: 132), citing post-structuralism, and Sinyard and Turner (1979:
218) all describe however, how Lemmon’s typically brow-beaten character in Some
Like It Hot finally acquires an identity when pushed outside of gender boundaries in
his queered Daphne persona, faithfully accepting a marriage proposal, and being
accepted (sexually (Sikov, 1994: 148)) for who he truly has become at the ending
when he tears his disguise off. To question the gender division was perhaps Wilder’s
boldest and most cunning satire.
A final point to consider in terms of Wilder’s use of satire in the Romantic
Comedy genre is how a suggested ideology may become dogma. The lead
characters in all these films are forced into deceit by their social situation. In each
case the character begins to believe in the lies they are perpetrating: Baxter believes
in company dogma and his success, Nestor believes the Lord is a separate entity,
Gerry/Daphne believes he is a girl and Spooner believes the prostitute is his wife.
Sinyard and Turner (1979: 223) think this is like Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1916), a
parable on the fluidity of personal identity, which also reflects back on the
depersonalising effect of the state, and the negative effect of the American Dream:
those with scruples may not emerge from the milieu at all, he who cheats will not
emerge as a mensch, but as an insect.

The Coen Brothers: Romantic Comedy As Fable

If Allen had taken the happy ending contrivance away from the genre,
increasing its realism, it did not stop its return in the late 80s. It is the Coen Brothers
however, who took pointers from the past masters to illustrate the ambiguous power

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of the convention. Although usually associated with independent cinema, their

romantic comedies were Hollywood, with Warner co-producing The Hudsucker Proxy
(1994) and Universal producing Intolerable Cruelty (2003).
Both movies adopt Cavell’s (1981) sub-genre of remarriage where the
destined couple compete with one another, often for the kind of social success
satirised by Lubitsch and Wilder. Intolerable Cruelty’s principle schematic influences
are satirised alternatives to The Awful Truth (McCarey, 1937) and Adam’s Rib
(Cukor, 1949) as the warring couple are a wealthy divorce lawyer and a succubus, a
professional divorcer. They share, like Gaston and Lily, a similar passion on the
fringes of morality (but not, satirically, the law), and like Gaston and Colet, a love of
fine things. Yet they feel unfulfilled, observing that their mentors, although rich, are
old and lonely. Their relationship looks untenable after they betray one another, each
in pursuit of the American Dream, but the Coens employ unbelievable artifice and
thinness of plot to render a completely positive narrative closure.
Rather than react to this, as many critics do, it seems sensible to consider
that our lawyer was over-eager to end the film before the genre would allow him to. In
relinquishing his profession - picking on the carrion of failed romance - and
abandoning his successful societal ways for love, he enjoys a Hollywood slow
handclap and victorious music before the plot’s catastrophe, when, betrayed he is out
of platitudes to draw on, and instead, must head towards the dour Allen realism of
romantic comedy/tragedy Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) by having an
inconvenient lover murdered. Fortunately, his nemesis/lover had everything under
control, genre-wise, and brought the film to a delightful close.
The Hudsucker Proxy draws on newspaper based remarriage films with
Jennifer Jason Leigh impersonating Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday, Hawks, 1940)
and Katherine Hepburn (Woman of the Year, Stevens, 1942), attempting to expose
Tim Robbins’ proxy as the fraud he is, before finding, inconveniently, that she is in
love with him. The proxy is clearly in the Wilder/Lemmon style: he begins in a
mailroom similar to the “Stomach of Paris”, and ascends the elevator to unjustified
success in a faceless corporation that employs thousands simply to manufacture
plastic circles - recalling Wilder’s dislike of bureaucracy and capitalism’s
wastefulness. Like Lemmon, the proxy even begins to believe in the fraud around
him.
As Joel Coen (in Tirard, 2002: 162) said, the film was “an experiment in
extreme artificiality”. That is, the 30s newspaper film clichés; an accounts

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department, opening sequence and time-frame stolen from The Apartment; a final
line from Irma; and an ironic noir juice and coffee bar suggest that classical
Hollywood romantic comedies are not realist, as they are often perceived to be, but
fables. The happy ending to this “modern variant of Candide” (Alleva, 1994: 22)
which sees both journalist and proxy-cum-chairman united, is provided by a magic
clock and an angel. When the Coens make films for Hollywood’s dream factory, their
message is that anything is possible; their independent films such as Fargo (1996)
are grimly realistic in contrast. The romantic comedy allegory privileges its happy
ending of love versus the world; but it is just one happy moment in the struggle of life,
just as the film is two hours of comic revelry making money for those it condemns.
Lubitsch revelled in this sort of escapism; as the charmer he could spend his
life hiding in Hollywood whilst people rushed around, mindlessly obeying societies’
strictures for immoral masters. Wilder however, really wanted to ease people out of
this mess, concealing his rapacious condemnation of capitalism and the American
Dream in light comedy and the facility of genre conventions. Finally, the Coen
Brothers explain to us that it is only in Hollywood that such resolutions are to be
found. That is, they show that Allen was right as revisionist to relinquish the “ending”
and maintain the eternal value of the comedy. The ridiculousness of the struggle
against a society worth satirising is what gives life meaning and narrative. Their
intertextuality and ludicrous plots are there to suggest that the greats of Romantic
Comedy are satirists in the tradition of Voltaire, they are producers of apologues
designed to help us better live our lives.
For all these filmmakers however, love and an authentic identity true to
oneself are fundamental, whilst satire exposes a Marxist and Kleistian regard
towards social ethics and national boundaries; not only are they relative, but any
leader – that is, developed self – in an American Dream society must manipulate
them. This manipulation is analogous with the Hollywood auteur’s desire to express
himself through the capitalist, commercial category of the romantic comedy genre.
The criminals die in gangster films because they take themselves too
seriously and are without love. The romantic comedy, however, is a loveable rogue
continuing, even now, to wilfully subvert Hollywood’s ideologies from within. Yet it
can never eliminate the trammels and contradictions of social life and love so as to
prevent our own - sometimes comic, sometimes tragic - engagement with them.

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Bibliography

Alleva, R. (1994) “What's entertainment? -- The Paper directed by Ron Howard / The
Hudsucker Proxy directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen”, in Commonweal, May 20th
1994, pg. 22.

Babington, B. and Evans, P. W. (1989) Affairs to remember: Hollywood’s comedy of

the sexes, Manchester and New York: MUP.

Cavell, S. (1981) Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage,

Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard.

Coughlin, P. (undated) “Joel and Ethan Coen” in Senses of Cinema at

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/coens.html, last accessed 21st
May 2005.

Deleuze, G. (1983) Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B.

Habberjam, London: Athlone [1986].

Hake, S. (1992) Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch,
Princeton: PUP.

Henry, N. (2001) Ethics and Social Criticism in the Hollywood Films of Erich von
Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, Westport, CT: Praeger.

Hopp, G. (2003) Billy Wilder: The Cinema of Wit 1906-2002, Cologne: Taschen.

Kafka, F. (1964) The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1923, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Kolakowski, L. (1985) Bergson, Oxford and New York: OUP.

Madsen, A. (1969) Billy Wilder, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1888) The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore,

Harmondsworth: Penguin [1985].

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Paul, W. (1983) Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, New York: Columbia University
Press.

Potter, C. (2002) I Love You But…: Romance, Comedy and the Movies, London:
Metheun.

Sikov, E. (1994) Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s, New
York: Columbia University Press.

Sinyard, N. and Turner, A. (1979) Journey Down Sunset Boulevard: The Films of
Billy Wilder, Ryde, Isle of Wight: BCW.

Tirard, L. (2002) Moviemakers’ Master Class: Private Lessons from the World’s
Foremost Directors, London and New York: Faber and Faber.

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Filmography

Adam’s Rib (1949) G. Cukor, USA.

Annie Hall (1977) W. Allen, USA.

Apartment, The (1960) B. Wilder, USA.

Awful Truth, The (1937) L. McCarey, USA.

“Clerk, The” (1932) E. Lubitsch in If I Had a Million, Paramount, USA.

Crimes and Misdemeanours (1989) W. Allen, USA.

Fargo (1996) J. Coen, USA/UK.

His Girl Friday (1940) H. Hawks, USA.

Hudsucker Proxy, The (1994) J. Coen, USA/Germany/UK.

Intolerable Cruelty (2003) J. Coen, USA.

Irma la Douce (1963) B. Wilder, USA.

Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) B. Wilder, USA.

Man Who Wasn’t There, The (2001) J. Coen, USA.

Merry Widow, The (1932) E. Lubitsch, USA.

Ninotchka (1939) E. Lubitsch, USA.

Procès, Le (The Trial) (1962) O. Welles, France/Italy/West Germany/Yugoslavia.

Some Like It Hot (1959) B. Wilder, USA.

Trouble in Paradise (1932) E. Lubitsch, USA.

Woman of the Year (1942) G. Stevens, USA.

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