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Alfred Hitchcock, Alva Johnston, Ben Hecht, Bosley Crowther, Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Cecelia Ager, Charles Laughton, Clark Gable, David L. Selznick, Ernst Lubitsch, Fan Magazines, Feminism, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Fredric March, Garson Kanin, George Stevens, Howard Hawks, In Name Only, Jack Benny, John Barrymore, John Cromwell, Love Before Breakfast, Mack Sennett, Made for Each Other, Mr and Mrs Smith, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, Olympia Kiriakou, Protofeminism, Rebecca, Rhea Langham, Screwball Comedy, Silent Movies, They Knew What They Wanted, To Be Or Not to Be, Twentieth Century, Vigil in the Night, William Powell, William Wellman, Woman of the Year, World War II
“When Carole Lombard talks, her conversation, often brilliant, is punctuated by screeches, laughs, growls, gesticulations, and the expletives of a sailor’s parrot,” Noel F. Busch wrote in a 1938 cover story for LIFE magazine, headlined ‘A Loud Cheer for the Screwball Girl.’ The actress he described was seemingly not unlike the madcap heroines she often played. At thirty, she had appeared in a diverse range of films over thirteen years, and exerted a degree of control in her career unusual for a star in the studio era. However, more than eighty years later, Lombard is still perceived as a kooky comedienne, her life’s arc defined by subsequent events including her marriage to Clark Gable, and her untimely death in 1942. Continue reading
