The matinee screening on Wednesday 24 June, will be introduced by journalist Darren Richman.
Screwball comedy doesn’t get any more effortlessly elegant and gleefully irreverent than this roulette wheel of romantic deception, gleaming with cunning wit and Continental élan. A couture-clad Claudette Colbert is divine as a penniless American showgirl who crashes Parisian high society by posing as a wealthy Hungarian baroness - but both a scheming nobleman (John Barrymore) and a smitten taxi driver (Don Ameche) are soon on to her game. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s sophisticated script - a typically subversive blend of fairy-tale escapism and caustic social observation—and the pitch-perfect direction of master craftsman Mitchell Leisen yield a topsy-turvy Cinderella story with a cynical bite. - Silent Film
Produced by Paramount Pictures, this was the fourth of 13 screenplays by the writing team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.
Darren Richman is a writer and journalist. He has a monthly column in Jewish News and his writing has appeared in The Guardian, Little White Lies and The New York Times. Between 2014 and 2018, he wrote a regular column for The Independent in which he championed obscure or forgotten films. He co-wrote My Life as Pat Sharp, a spoof memoir published by Little Brown. He had a romantic comedy feature film in development with Big Talk and he wrote and produced 84303, a documentary that aired on the History Channel on Holocaust Memorial Day. The film was selected as pick of the day in The Guardian and The Daily Mail.
