Description
This three-session PowerPoint course will analyze, place in historical context, and screen in large format a trio of distinctive Hollywood comedies that were produced at different stages of WWII:
- Ernst Lubitsch’s sharply satirical 1942 anti-Nazi film To Be or Not to Be, starring Carole Lombard and Jack Benny, which was in production when Pearl Harbor was attacked;
- George Stevens’ screwball comedy The More the Merrier, directed mid-war, in 1943, and starring Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn, about the critical housing shortage in wartime Washington, D.C.; and
- Charles Vidor’s knowing, tongue-in-cheek look at a patriotic older adult volunteering for Army officer training in Over 21, starring Irene Dunne, Alexander Knox, and Charles Coburn, produced during the final months of the war, and conveying the need to live by FDR’s Four Freedoms and plans for a permanent peace following the end of the war.
