If you live in New York and you pay attention to the movies (or if you don’t live here but you read about film across the blogosphere, say), then it’s probably safe to assume you are aware of Film Forum’s Breadlines & Champagne series, running now through March 5th. All the films are shown in 35mm, plenty are not available on DVD and every day there’s a new 2-for-1 double bill of 1930s Depression-era cinema. This Saturday, the ever-dreaded (around here, at least) and always-plastic Valentine’s Day offers a delicious dream pairing sure to propel its audience back outside with all the right Hallmark-approved sentiment appropriate to gaudy reds and garish pinks and overpriced (and often terrible) chocolate: Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) followed by Mitchel Leisen’s Easy Living (1937). Indeed, Film Forum’s program has a David Thomson endorsement that says, “If you paired [Easy Living] with My Man Godfrey, you’d have a beautiful portrait of money in New York—and a happy audience.”

J. Hoberman wrote this in the Village Voice to mark the opening of the program: “‘Breadlines & Champagne’ doesn’t showcase the full range of early-’30s Hollywood, but it is particularly rich in ‘preachment yarns’—movies that trafficked in lurid topicality while expressing a measure of passionately confused social protest.” What Hoberman fails to say here is that this confusion he points to often results in screwball romance, or provides its impetus. What’s striking to my eyes watching this series unspool over the past week is the strong will to shuck the city, in many cases to leave New York behind, or at least uproot it—as William Powell does in his defining role as Godfrey Park—in order to find romance’s salvation. Or, more basically, to reset.

Early in My Man Godfrey, Eugene Pallette (playing put-upon patriarch Alexander Bullock) stands at a bar, downing some kind of alcohol, while a “scavenger hunt” bustles about the grand hall he’s trying to ignore. A stranger joins him, tells him the commotion resembles an asylum. Pallette, ever gravel-voiced and brusquely pathetic, grumbles, “All you need is a room and the right kind of people.” This seems a perfect description not just for folly (or madness) but for the romance (to say the folly and the madness) of movie-watching. Or an imperative about how to have some fun in this wicked life. And, sure enough, as Godfrey’s finale attests, all you need to get married—issues of desire aside, or smirked at—is a room, like a renovated shack turned into a nightclub, some groceries and firewood and the right kind of man, like a city official plucked from his dinner, to say the right kind of words. In a film so much about propriety, and a certain form of education therein, “the right words” might translate into “the just words” as, one might expect, this film and its bill-mate are indeed films about the just city and our commitment to it; or, perhaps, the justice and decency available in the city as we inhabit in times such as these.

Unfortunately, not all the films offered live up to this claim. In fact, a fair number of them are probably obscured by history for a reason. However, to continue a trend, there is a pleasure to be had in seeing older films of middling “quality” since their “value” is raised, to complete a circle, by that very remove of history. The “Breadlines” series opener, I’m No Angel, starring Mae West, is, to be blunt, a simple thing. It is entertaining, no doubt, offering plenty to think about that measure of society at that time (those black ladies doting on Mae can make one squirm a bit), but it aims low and it knows it—and that’s fine. Its ideas about love as a commodity are nothing compared to the film that followed, Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle, which makes such a comparison fruitless, and directs me to consider the Warren William double bill shown on Tuesday (1933’s Employees’ Entrance followed by 1932’s Skyscraper Souls) as it is of the same, well, class as the West picture. That is, they share a similar perspective on romance in that society. In all three, the capitalist drive embodied by the films’ stars (William and West) sees the game rigged. Since I’m No Angel features Cary Grant opposite West, things turn out alright, and there’s a happiness found (if in compromise). Since Warren William appears committed to playing a devil, love is a haven outside his world: hence, the flight from the city (or its representation, respectively, as a department store and as a tower).

While the Warren William films figure capitalism in strikingly lucid conceptual terms, what truly separates his twin pictures from the pair to be shown Saturday is best understood in the discrepancy between the sets of screenplays. Employees’ Entrance may be tighter than Skyscraper Souls, but even its brisk funneling of narratives cannot compete with the elegance of something like My Man Godfrey or the express clatter of Easy Living’s Preston Sturges dialogue. The William pictures are screwball in the sense that they’re preposterous not that their plots’ madcap-ness are all that, well, madcap. Most of the jokes are “did he really?” moments, or pratfalls.

Plus, there’s that matter of language. Each of the Valentine’s Day pair pays such a strict attention to language as more than just information, as a performance all its own, that it is no wonder they offer a brighter picture of the city. (By contrast, in the case of the Borzage, it’s the attention to light—the literal luminosity—that gives us a lift, even as its couple flees the city for an unknown future.) To return to Godfrey, we can perhaps agree that another of its virtues is just how well this man, Godfrey, as embodied by William Powell, performs his words; whereas Warren William, ever the cad, refuses affection in favor of base possession. Maybe it’s a simple matter of charisma. One set of films, while charming and diverting, do not invite the audience to dream beyond their stations (their seats), while the other offers an avenue for the possibilities of our citizens to build a better country within the city and without.

In case you cannot make it to the Film Forum tomorrow night, for whatever reason, both films are available on DVD and well worth any evening’s plans, be it greeting-card-sanctioned or not. Besides, at home you can drink your own champagne, easier build your own (private) union.