Twentieth Century and Bringing Up Baby

Twentieth Century

Columbia, $19.99

Bringing Up Baby

Warner Bros., $26.99

Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936), and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937) are routinely, and rightly, celebrated as the collective genesis of screwball comedy. Why Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century (1934) is rarely mentioned in the same giggle is unfathomable. It's the very crucible of the genre. Whereas It Happened One Night was foot-loose and fancy-free, it was also a fairly standard comedy: a runaway heiress and the reporter pursuing her. Released the same year, Twentieth Century rockets on the mania of its lunatic lovers. Other than William Wyler's roaring Counsellor at Law (a first-rate Kino DVD), this crescendo farce of a Broadway megalomaniac and the lingerie model he svengalis to stardom is the pinnacle of John Barrymore's talkies. In their wild and woolly adaptation of Napoleon of Broadway from stage to screen, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur not only tapped DNA deep into Barrymore's thespian might, they also set the template for their reteaming with Hawks on His Girl Friday (1940). Carole Lombard begets the line of Hawksian leading ladies in Twentieth Century – a fox at home with the hounds. Kate Hepburn is nothing less in what many consider the summit of screwballs, Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938), only it's a leopard she has at home (the titular Baby). Cary Grant never quite pulls off nerdy scientist, Harold Lloyd glasses et al., but Hepburn rarely played sweeter, and together the two rising stars lay hallowed groundwork for their successive pairings in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story. An hourlong Hawks doc, an 85-minute Turner Classics special on Grant, and Peter Bogdanovich commentary that quickly peters out add up to a second disc of supplementals, which reveal that the script for Baby was inspired by Hepburn's having worked with director John Ford.

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Dinner at Eight (Warner Bros.)/Stage Door (Warner Bros.):

If the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, Hecht & MacArthur would've fought to the death with playwrights George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, whose source material begot both these silver screen gems. George Cukor's impeccable dramedy Dinner at Eight (1933) uncorks another top-shelf chapter of the Barrymore bio, equaled by a cast including his brother Lionel, Billie Burke, and a definitive Jean Harlow. La Cava's stellar Stage Door (1936) offers a biting, bantering, backstage peak at a Broadway lodging house for actresses (Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, and Adolphe Menjou as another Napoleonic stage producer), grounded by Katharine Hepburn. "We're probably a different race of people," she concludes of her profession.