In 1935 Norman Krasna was hailed by his colleagues as the Boy Wonder of Hollywood. By age twenty-five, he had written stories and screenplays for several film comedies, and his original story for The Richest Girl in the World (1934) had received an Academy award nomination. His second play, Small Miracle, was running on Broadway and had been bought by a film company. Indeed, during the 1930s and through the 1940s and 1950s, Krasna wrote film scripts that lifted the genre of screwball comedy to a level of sophisticated entertainment. Mistaken identity, the Cinderella story, and the humanizing of cynics and curmudgeons are the chief elements of Krasna's plots. His characters and their surroundings are often drawn from his own experiences and include newspapermen, press agents, employees of department stores, and servicemen back from the war. By the 1960s, however, his plots had worn thin and were less engaging.

Norman...