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Elaine May’s 1971 directorial debut, A New Leaf was a watershed moment within May’s career, but as a film important to the contemporary development of American comedy cinema. This chapter will examine A New Leaf as part of a greater comedic tradition, particularly in terms of pre-code and 1930s/1940s screwball comedy, later black comedies, and romantic comedies about unlikely couplings between unsympathetic protagonists, forging a connection between the theme of romance, finance, and mortality. This chapter argue that A New Leaf represents an important development in this subgenre, and examines A New Leaf in connection to the relatively unsentimental romantic comedies of the ‘60s and ‘70s concerned with unlikely couplings that concern an unlikely romance that develops as the result of a search for fortune.

As a satirical or native English comedy, The Taming of the Shrew has been contentious in modern times for its inescapable patriarchal assumptions, but also extremely popular on stage and screen. However, there have been periodically ingenious solutions to the cultural problems which are visible in movies. During the 1930s strong, independent women were cast in ‘screwball comedies’ in which they were more than a match for the men, while later versions of the same kind of genre based on The Shrew made when feminism was developing present a different kind of antagonistic dynamic between a strong woman and strong man. This chapter traces these and other versions of ‘madly mated’ people who become marriage partners.

Film had always been accompanied by sound in one form or another, but the ‘talkies’ introduced the prospect of a wider variety of film genres within mainstream narrative cinema that had not been possible during the silent era: genres that were reliant on language and verbalisation rather than mime and gesture. This development marked a change in film performance and acting style. As noted by Robert B. Ray: ‘Sound and the new indigenous acting style encouraged the flourishing of genres that silence and grandiloquent acting had previously hindered: the musical, the gangster film, the detective story, screwball comedy and humour that depended on language rather than slapstick.’ Although silent slapstick comedy remained in Hollywood, championed by the Marx Brothers, among others, the ‘talkies’ created great demand for a new generation of actors, those who could speak; it also generated a near-panic when these proved to be not that easily obtainable. Writers and directors of screwball comedy seized this opportunity, recognising that the comedy genre needed to incorporate the possibilities offered by synchronised sound.

This chapter considers the creation of Cary Grant’s star persona – the combination of image, the characters he played, and the publicity that came to form his screen identity – between his early 1930s movies and his breakthrough roles in two 1937 films, Topper, (MGM) and The Awful Truth (Columbia). Grant was neither convincing and comfortable in the ‘likeable rough guy’ roles, in which Paramount (his original studio) cast him in the early Depression years, notably in the 1933 Mae West vehicle, She Done Him Wrong. Going freelance in 1937 led to a change of fortune and a new identity in screwball comedy. By now, the worst of the Depression was over, even if full recovery was elusive. Grant epitomised a newly confident American male, a consumer who cares about fashion and appearance, a leisurely figure who enjoys urban life, and a husband worthy of an attractive wife, but one who was not perfect and often in danger of losing his dignity – thereby suggesting the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy.

Chapter 2 illustrates an aesthetically productive balance between easy understanding and cognitive challenge in classical Hollywood cinema with extended analyses of His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity. These films combine classical narrative, stylistic, ideological, and genre properties with artistic devices that complicate formal patterning and thwart audience expectations.

Chapter 3 studies the aesthetic pleasures of Hollywood cinema’s approach to storytelling. It examines the cognitive processes at work when a film cues spectators to construct a film’s story in their minds, and it explains the ways in which Hollywood movies both facilitate and complicate the spectator’s process of story construction. The chapter offers a new theory of Hollywood storytelling aesthetics—illustrated with examples from whodunits, screwball comedies, twist films, and mysteries—that film viewers take pleasure not just in narrative unity and easy understanding, as previous scholars have argued, but also in narrative disunity and cognitive challenge. With support from experimental psychology, the chapter argues that viewers enjoy narratives that stimulate moments of free association, insight, and incongruity-resolution.