1930s comedies far from escapist, film expert argues

As the Virginia Film Festival ramped up Thursday, Princeton University professor Maria DiBattista told an audience she doesn’t think Depression-era comedies were escapist, despite common sentiments to the contrary.

Instead, she sees them as an endorsement of the life common men and women lived.

She said the films highlight “a kind of hardscrabble American humor.”

DiBattista backed up her point with clips from a handful of films from the era featuring such tropes as a screwball heiress spending time with a dignified hobo and a rebellious heiress spending time with a worldly reporter.

“Say, where’d you learn to dunk? In finishing school?” the reporter, played by Clark Gable, asks a doughnut-wielding heiress in 1934’s “It Happened One Night.”And at the same time that Depression-era comedies warmly embraced plebeian American traditions — doughnut dunking and equality around the burn barrel, for example — they also were slyly, even subversively, questioning the idea that having more money and more perceived class were necessarily better, DiBattista said.

That was a good topic for comedies, the professor said, because Americans are skittish about discussing differences of class.

“American individuals like to think that the differences between them are not the differences between the poor and rich, the low- and high-born,” she said.

DiBattista was in town as a festival fellow and presented a multi-day class to students at UVa, with Thursday’s presentation at Monroe Hall, titled “The Funny Business of Business,” as a sort of capstone.

Second-year student Shep Ware, who was in the class, said a wide variety of people brought perspectives to DiBattista’s class.

“We were able to come at it from a lot of different angles, but professor DiBattista sort of served as our anchor,” third-year student Anna Mahone said.

The 22nd annual film festival kicked off Thursday and continues through the weekend. Scheduled highlights include appearances by Matthew Broderick, star of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “The Producers,” and cult filmmaker John Waters, the so-called “Pope of Trash” known for his movies “Pink Flamingos,” “Serial Mom” and “Hairspray.”

For more information on the festival, visit http://www.vafilm.com.