Review of Twentieth Century

I'm sure everyone's experienced this a few times in their film watching lives: you sit down excitedly to watch a film that is widely considered to be a classic, but, from start to finish, it rubs you the wrong way. Nearly everything about it bothers you, you are annoyed and you can't see how anyone could possibly enjoy it. That's what happened to me when I watched Howard Hawks' Twentieth Century. I was led to believe that it was one of the best comedies of the 1930s. For its first half, I wasn't even quite sure it was a comedy. I could see a few comic bits, notably a stereotypical inebriated character, but it didn't seem to be trying to be a comedy. Maybe a subtle comedy, I thought. It wasn't working on me at all. The second half jumps into a more plainly comic situation, but to me it still wasn't working. I laughed exactly once, a small guffaw that I wished I could have taken back. The plot involves egotistical theater director John Barrymore as he discovers, then moulds, then loves, then loses, then tries to get back Carole Lombard. I guess the comedy is supposed to come from Barrymore's extreme hamminess. To be fair, nobody does ham like John Barrymore, and he does it well. But it doesn't seem too far off his dramatic roles, so I never got that I was supposed to find his meanness amusing. I just hated him. I pitied Lombard as the ingénue at the beginning of the film. Later in the film, she also is a blowhard, a famous Hollywood actress. I hated her, as well. Barrymore and Lombard spend most of the movie shouting at each other at ridiculous volumes. I just wanted it to end. It just seemed like the kind of thing a playwright would find clever, and it comes off as a badly written play.