The collision of John Barrymore and the genre of screwball comedy was one of those rare moments in history in which all the universe's elements seemed to be perfectly aligned. Screwball, with its outsized energy, verbal acrobatics, and sexual rapacity, was invented for an actor like Barrymore, who embodied those traits in life and art like no other actor before or since. And Barrymore, whose film career now looks like a landscape of mediocrity pocked with mounds of brilliance, was born for screwball, where his untrammeled theatricality was not only appropriate, but definitive. These two great tastes came together in Twentieth Century (1934), which is just one in a long line of great films by Howard Hawks, but is easily the best film John Barrymore ever got anywhere near.

Last week marked the 120th anniversary of Barrymore's birth into the last of the great American acting dynasties. Of his three siblings (sister Ethel, brother Lionel), John was by far the biggest star, though he tried for years to avoid taking on the family mantle, working as a painter and a newspaperman before eventually stepping into the spotlight that had awaited him since birth. After a series of triumphant Broadway productions, most notably Richard III and Hamlet, which ran for 101 performances in 1922 (the extra one was so he could break the record), he became the most famous actor in the world, a profile that only soared with the advent of motion pictures.

Barrymore's virile splendor, coupled with his aquiline beauty and fearless showmanship, combined to make him a movie star of the first order. Silents like Beau Brummel, Don Juan, The Sea Beast, and, most notably, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (in which Barrymore transformed himself convincingly from doctor to monster in a single shot, without the use of makeup), cemented his reputation as both a man's and a ladies' man. He was rich, famous, rugged, and beautiful. He was also doomed.

By the mid-'20s, the name John Barrymore was synonymous with acting, success, fame, and glory; 10 years later, it had become synonymous with farce, dissolution, and self-parody. The family curse of alcoholism latched onto John Barrymore at an early age and never let go. Though he was a glamorous drunk (I highly recommend John Fowler's nostalgic biography Good Night, Sweet Prince to anyone who enjoys a good pissing-in-the-flowerpot yarn), he was a horribly self-destructive one, too, the kind who winds up drinking his wife's perfume while trying to dry out. He drank to excess, and then to abjection, ruining his good looks and booming voice until he was a bloated, sallow-skinned, dead-eyed wretch by his mid-50s. By then, the only commodity left to him was the ghost of his fame, which he prostituted regularly in a series of increasingly humiliating projects.

In films like Playmates and The Great Profile, on the weekly Rudy Vallee radio program, and in touring company productions of mediocre plays like My Dear Children, Barrymore typically played a laughingstock version of himself--drunk, divorced, deluded--sometimes thinly veiled, sometimes not veiled at all. What made the caricature possible (and heartbreaking, even 60 years later) was the fact that John Barrymore had been so majestic an archetype. Though he was fond of burying his famous profile under makeup and beards (as in Svengali and Topaze--his other greatest roles), he was always Barrymore, and he was beloved for it, until he wasn't. His dissolution is one of the earliest and nastiest examples of the public's desire to see its celebrities suffer.

Twentieth Century, then, was Barrymore's last best moment as a film star, and as an actor. He plays Oscar Jaffe, an overbearing, histrionic, titanically hammy Broadway impresario obviously modeled on himself. Jaffe discovers a clerk named Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard), changes her name to Lily Garland, and makes a star and a wife out of her. Lily then leaves him, ruining Jaffe's career. They meet again, aboard the Twentieth Century cross-country train, where Jaffe conspires to enlist Lily for a career-saving comeback production.

The film is somewhat crude (it was Hawks' first sound comedy), but Barrymore's performance is a masterpiece of slow-building hysteria. The progress in his long opening scene, during which he professes his love for the theater, coaches his discovery mercilessly, and fires an assistant for disagreeing ("You gray rat! I'm closing the iron door on you!"), makes you believe you've seen his whole show. But then come the real fireworks. By the time they get on the train, and he's in the cabin with Lombard, kicking, screaming, impersonating a camel, and thrusting his index finger into the air like an emperor, you realize that he'd been waiting for that role his whole life.

The tragedy is that he spent the rest of his life trying to duplicate it.