If the screen’s Golden Age of Comedy was the silent era, where does that put those early, valiant filmmakers who tried to get laughs with sound, braving the new technology? They didn’t get much help from the two greatest silent clowns, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, with the former daring to continue working without dialogue in City Lights (1931), and the latter sadly misused, and ultimately fired, by MGM. Logically, the joining of screen comedy and spoken dialogue included a spate of talk-filled adaptations of hit plays, resulting in some very stagy and claustrophobic films like The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1929). The better of these stage-to-screeners, such as Holiday (1930) and Private Lives (1931), were able to transmit to moviegoers the exuberant spirits of their source material. With George Cukor’s elegant Dinner at Eight (1933), the filmed Broadway play was solidified as a valued staple of literate screen comedy. Also emerging as a mainstay of the sound era were the European-set high comedies, typified by Ernst Lubitsch’s divine Trouble in Paradise (1932), a form that flourished until World War II ended Europe’s reign as the most chic place to set a sophisticated comedy. The early thirties also saw Frank Capra fine-tuning his brand of big-hearted, all-American comedy, which reached flawless fruition with his It Happened One Night (1934), the model romantic comedy from which hundreds of others stole freely. Spanning the first quarter-century of the sound era, the talking comedies included here celebrate the talented people, both directors and performers, who were among the most proficient in the art of getting laughs with dialogue. Some are legends—Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, directors Cukor, Capra, and Preston Sturges—but all of the following key artists—including those great character people, such as Frank Morgan, Guy Kibbee, and Franklin Pangborn—did their part in making those wondrous first 25 years of verbal comedy truly hilarious.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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