Fueled by the wit of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and the ace timing of Howard Hawks, Twentieth Century heads faster than a speeding locomotive for screwball city, carrying Carole Lombard, possibly the thirties' funniest comedienne, and John Barrymore in a no-holds-barred performance. On the train from Chicago to New York, typically tyrannical Broadway producer Oscar Jaffe (Barrymore) discovers in the next compartment none other than actress Lilly Garland (Lombard), née Mildred Plotke, his one-time discovery and wife who left him after he bore her four flops. He connives to lure her back, enduring all the while a parade of characters both known (Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns as his theatrical sidekicks) and unknown (Etienne Giradot as a Twentieth Century religious fanatic plastering the train with Jesus stickers). Lilly herself, supposedly en route to normality from the frenzy of theater life, meets Jaffe's challenge farce for farce, and then some. Andrew Sarris has dubbed Twentieth Century one of the first screwball comedies, explaining that it is “the first comedy in which sexually attractive, sophisticated stars indulged in their own slapstick instead of delegating it to their inferiors.”