A Film Canon

 

 

It's questionable whether Twentieth Century deserves to be classified as a screwball comedy at all, let alone as one of the foundational instances of the genre, just because John Barrymore, playing a thinly concealed version of himself, embodies everything about the theatre incompatible with that genre. This is particularly evident in his prioritisation of body language at the expense of spoken language, which renders the screwball condensation of the body to the voice - or, alternatively, of consummation to conversation - meaningless, since it refuses to acknowledge any fundamental difference between the two. This robs every conversation of the transgressive ingenuity it might have possessed, replacing it with an hysteria that reaches fever pitch in Barrymore's exchanges with his ex-lover, encountered on the titular train, where most of the action occurs. Although this is clearly presented as a decline narrative, there's no real linguistic, stylistic or affective counterpoint to Barrymore's persona - a tragic, egomaniacal, aging director - such that his directorial disempowerment is ultimately offset by the extent to which he proves himself capable of directing and manipulating his own life. In this light, it may make more sense to view Twentieth Century alongside such theatrically-inflected films as 42nd Street and Love Me Tonight, with the critical qualification that, instead of interrogating the theatre, it merely registers a nostalgia for it and, finally, wants to become it - a self-destructive stance whose logical conclusion is that the ascent of (sound) cinema is the fundamental decline narrative.