Based on Charles Bruce Millholland’s celebrated play, Howard Hawks’ Twentieth Century purports to champion the noble theater over the base cinema, yet this seminal 1934 screwball comedy is nothing if not a shining example of moviemaking magnificence. Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore) is a Broadway maestro whose newest Pygmalion, Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard), is given the name Lily Garland, a round of caustic acting lessons (including Jaffe teaching her how to properly scream by pricking her behind with a pin), and the lead role in the director’s latest production. When Lilly becomes a sensation and bristles at Oscar’s increasingly possessive behavior, she flees for the bright matinee lights of Hollywood, becoming a mega-star and leaving the despondent, creatively barren Oscar – who possesses a habit of disingenuously threatening suicide – on the brink of ruin. Years later, the two are fortuitously reunited aboard the Twentieth Century train speeding from Chicago to New York, igniting a flurry of manic, lighthearted shenanigans involving the desperate Oscar’s attempt to resign Lilly to a contract with the help of his boozing staff (Oliver Webb and Owen O’Malley) and a deranged old coot (Etienne Girardot) who’s surreptitiously plastering religious stickers all over the locomotive. Hawks’ direction maintains a sublime grace even as his film rockets into stagey insanity, and Lombard and Barrymore wonderfully complement each other as the contentious artistic couple, the latter giving a tour de force performance of hilarious hysterics that embodies the very best aspects of the term “theatricality.”
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