The History Of Romantic Films

The screwball comedy is a subgenre of the comedy film genre. It has proven to be one of the most popular and enduring film genres. It first gained prominence in 1934 with It Happened One Night, and, although many film scholars would agree that its classic period ended sometime in the early 1940s, elements of the genre have persisted, or have been paid homage to, in contemporary film.

While there is no authoritative list of the defining characteristics of the screwball comedy genre, films considered to be definitive of the genre usually feature farcical situations, a combination of slapstick with fast-paced repartee, and a plot involving courtship and marriage or remarriage. The film critic Andrew Sarris has defined the screwball comedy as "a sex" comedy without the sex.

(1896) (aka The May Irwin Kiss) although regarded as "disgusting" and scandalous, a Victorian couple May Irwin and John Rice re-enacted a lingering kiss. This was produced for Thomas Edison's film from their 1895 Broadway stage play The Widow Jones; it was the first film ever made of a couple kissing in cinematic history. It then became the most popular film produced that year by Edison's film company (it was filmed at Edison's Black Maria studio, in West Orange, NJ)

The first American feature-length sex film was Traffic in Souls (1913) (aka While New York Sleeps) The original vamp and first movie sex goddess, the full-bosomed Theda Bara, starred in a number of early silent’s for the Fox Film Corporation - her first lurid, slinky vamp appearance (and first lead role) was in Fox's melodramatic A Fool There Was (1915).

It was not until the creation of romantic love in the western European medieval period, though, that "romance" came to refer to "romantic love" situations, rather than the heroic adventures of medieval Romance. These adventures, however, often revolved about a knight's feats on behalf of a lady, and so the modern themes of love were quickly woven into them, as in Chrétien de Troyes's Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart.