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Cruel' Kisses  George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones have teamed up with the Oscar-winning trio of Brian Grazer and the Coen Brothers for the hilarious new film "Intolerable Cruelty." Access Hollywood's Billy Bush found out from George that locking lips with Catherine is anything but cruel.Billy Bush: Discuss each other's form for a second. Good kissers? Is George a great kisser? The ladies of America are dying to know.
Catherine Zeta-Jones: He's a great kisser.
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| To the manner born...George Clooney carries the flag for screwball comedy in Coens''Intolerable Cruelty' Tender Trap: George Clooney with Catherine Zeta-Jones in 'Intolerable Cruelty'
 Is George Clooney the new king of screwball comedy?Think Cary Grant and Clark Gable, two dashing male leads who relished such roles in the popular 1930s and '40s genre. They fought the battle of the sexes with witty dialogue, made fun of the rich as though they existed to do so, and love reigned in the end.
It's a genre that's often been relegated to "classic" status, but with "Intolerable Cruelty" (which opens Oct. 10), the pairing of Clooney and the writer-director team of Joel and Ethan Coen may signal its comeback.
The 42-year-old star is often compared with Grant and Gable. In the Coen brothers' "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," his comic impersonation of Gable was spot-on. In such films as "One Fine Day," "Out of Sight," and "Ocean's 11," his performances have reminded viewers of Grant's suave, twinkly-eyed charisma and masculine self-assurance.
 "Clooney took a lot of chances in 'O Brother,'" says film critic Richard Jameson. "He left himself open to mockery or looking foolish, playing a guy who was self-congratulatingly oafish. It was a wonderful take-off on mid-'30s Clark Gable. "He bears more of a physical resemblance to Gable," Jameson continues. "But he has the poise, smoothness and intelligence of Grant. The story's still being written, though. It's premature to go whole-hog and compare him to one of those giants." Clooney admits that being likened to such iconic stars is "very flattering.""I get it," he says, recognizing why the comparison is made by relating it to "Intolerable Cruelty."
"I loved 'His Girl Friday,' 'Bringing Up Baby.' I'm a big fan of Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks," he adds, referring to some of the screwball genre's finest films and directors.
But as for his resemblance to Grant and Gable? "No," he says. "And look, these guys aren't here to defend themselves." SOME WERE SAPS
 "These guys" were the sexy charmers - Gable more rugged than Grant - who in screwball's adult confrontations usually got the girl, but not until they'd both jumped through hoops.Sometimes, though, the heroes of those comedies were book smart but naive - Henry Fonda in "The Lady Eve," Gary Cooper in "Ball of Fire," James Stewart in "You Can't Take It With You" - and are therefore outwitted, up to a point, by smartmouthed city girls played by the likes of Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Arthur.
"Intolerable Cruelty" plays out the modern battle of the sexes with sharp exchanges as a handsome, ruthless L.A. divorce lawyer, Miles Massey (Clooney), and a seductive, gold-digging divorcee, Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones), scheme against each other until love conquers all. Along the way, the Coens, in the spirit of Capra and Sturges, take potshots at the rich and shallow denizens of Beverly Hills.
LAWYER IN LOVE
  The mood is classic screwball - snarky, glib and amoral. Massey distorts testimony so that his adversaries' clients end up on the street. He addresses a convention of matrimonial attorneys on the dispensation of marital assets following murder and suicide. The Massey prenup is so ironclad that Harvard Law School devotes an entire semester to it.And yet something's missing from Massey's life. He's recently bought two new cars, has a running tab at the Mercedes dealership and a guy waxing his private plane. But nothing satisfies him.
Enter Mrs. Rexroth, whose soon-to-be ex-husband has hired Massey. From the moment she walks into his office - with her lawyer - Massey is smitten.
He invites Marylin to dinner, an act that could have him disbarred. But he still nails her on a professional level and she gets zilch in the divorce settlement.
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It's time for her to find a new husband. Quickly. Next time around, she'll hire Massey as her lawyer. Or perhaps she has something else in mind?
 "These characters don't realize the trouble they're in emotionally until they run into each other," says Clooney. "Miles is kind of an idiot savant. He's very good at one aspect of his life, but terrible at the rest. He's incredibly skilled at structuring things that hurt people."But with Marylin, "he's a hopeless romantic," Clooney adds. In one scene, after she's retained his professional services, he escorts her away from her husband-to-be-of-the-moment (Billy Bob Thornton) for a private chat, and, once again, Miles could be disbarred, as Marylin is quick to point out.
"That scene when I kiss her at the elevator? Miles has that look of the total sap: From here on out, [he's] done," says Clooney.
"Intolerable Cruelty" is "classic screwball comedy stuff," says Ethan Coen. "The hard-hearted woman, the soft-hearted man. The calculating woman, the romantic dopey man..."
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 "And [yet] the romantic dopey man is a divorce attorney," says Joel Coen, who clearly enjoys the paradox.The Coens claim a debt to Blake Edwards' comedies and the movies they watched as kids, "those leering sex comedies of the '60s, those cheesy comedies with titles like 'How to Divorce Your Wife,'" says Ethan.
"'A Touch of Mink,' late Cary Grant, late Bob Hope," adds Joel. "We thought that was the pinnacle of cinematic art." With "Intolerable Cruelty," "we tried to make an adult movie," says Ethan, laughing. "It's some weird, childlike view of what sex is all about. Demented."
"Guys in skirts is funny," offers Joel, referring to a scene in which Clooney is dressed in a kilt in a tacky Las Vegas chapel. It may remind some viewers of Grant acting in drag in Hawks' "I Was a Male War Bride" (1949).
 "It's as if the Coen brothers have taken all the old Hollywood genres and ticked them off one by one," says David thomson, author of "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film" (Knopf). "'Miller's Crossing' was an old-fashioned gangster picture. 'The Hudsucker Proxy' was a Capraesque screwball film."Thomson notes that "the great screwball comedies made in this country in the 1930s and '40s is one of the film traditions in which we should have the most pride. The people in them talked to each other in an interesting, emotional way."
He offers one reason why that tradition began to wane.
"What happened after the '30s was this huge wave of Actors Studio acting, which places hesitation, pause and inarticulateness more central to the American character.
"The whole acting style of Brando and Steve McQueen is very male, 'You're making me talk and I'm not good at words.'"
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COMEDY WITH TEETH "Intolerable Cruelty," on the other hand, represents a return to razor-sharp badinage between two highly articulate antagonists, with a few touches of physical comedy thrown in."It was scary to play the role," Clooney says of Massey. "If you underplay it, the movie dies. In 'O Brother,' I was out there on a limb, too."
It's a limb the Coen brothers won't let Clooney slip off. They particularly enjoy playing off his good looks.
In "Intolerable Cruelty," we first meet Massey through his teeth: He is talking on a cell phone in a salon as strange lights bounce off his pearly whites. How did the Coens come up with that one?
"I don't really remember," says Joel. "I guess we were reading about teeth-whitening services - there was a lot of that in L.A. "George is a fabulously good-looking guy, and there's something that appeals to the three of us about making him ridiculously vain."
In "O Brother," set in the rural South in the '30s, Clooney plays an escaped convict who, though he often sleeps by the side of the road, makes sure he dons a hair net each night.
And for the next Coen-Coen-Clooney collaboration?
"In 'O Brother,' it was hair," says clooney. "In 'Intolerable Cruelty,' it's teeth. They keep looking. I'm running out of body parts. What are they going to do next? Wax my back?"
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