A Film Canon

This seminal screwball comedy brims with the surplus value of speech, characterising conversation as just another bourgeois inanity, and evoking a world in which "everybody talks shop", but says nothing; or, alternatively, in which language itself has ceased to be individuated, existing as a mere elaboration of the radio advertisement that occurs in the second act, the butler's ventriloquial drone in the third, and, most dramatically, a spectrum of hyperbolic sounds that range from a gondolier's pitiful imitation of opera to a proliferation of hysterical Italian, Russian and German outbursts. In this light, the real transgression of the two protagonists - working-class thieves - is their appropriation and explication of this conversational mileu, clearest in a perverse miscommunication that, encompassing punning, repetition and pedantry, lays memorable emphasis upon the materiality of language. This is accompanied by a series of montage sequences that edit out one half of a conversation, breaking down all distinction between speaker and listener. Not only does this construe 'communication' as solipsism, it acknowledges the inevitable implication of the protagonists in the very world that they are subverting - although the jouissance with which they delight in that participation is itself subversive, opening up areas previously considered off-limits for a mainstream film, as evinced in the references to 'spanking' and 'sex appeal', as well as the sheer quantity and audacity of double entendres.