My Man Godfrey - 1936

“My Man Godfrey” (1936) pegs the era in such a precise way. It’s duality is its greatest charm --a light and airy foolishness above a message of grim reality that makes it a timeless foray into a specific Depression-era genre: the screwball comedy. Carole Lombard reigned as screwball’s quintessential high priestess. We celebrate the Carole Lombard blogathon today, sponsored by Carole & Company. Have a look for other participating blogs here.

Screwball comedy in the 1930s often doubled as social commentary, that was how it worked best. It threw darts, but lacked pretension. It called a spade a spade with honest and earthy directness, but without being cynical. There was still a luminescent idealism. It told its audiences of the day the way things were, and left an unmistakable footprint for future generations to vicariously experience the 1930s.

The film, directed by Gregory La Cava, begins famously with those credits stylized as neon signs over a cityscape, panning slowly until we pass the glitter and end up at the town dump. A “Hooverville” exists here. As frothy as the café society nightlife is depicted in this movie, the dump set is remarkably gritty and realistic. And big. A lot of work on the detail of that dump set.

Carole Lombard is a ditzy Young Thing on the town. She is on a scavenger hunt, one of the fads of the 1930s, that is organized by the party she is attending at the Waldorf-Ritz. Her older sister, played by Gail Patrick, is also in the competition, and Miss Patrick reaches the dump first for the next item on their list. A “forgotten man”. This was the euphemism in the day for a hobo or bum, or street person. Forgotten man sounds almost politically correct, doesn’t it? President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the term (though he did not invent it) in referring to the folks who needed relief, and the phrase took off.

The Forgotten Man of the piece is William Powell. Powell is excellent here, a man intelligence and dignity, whose bitterness at living among the ash heaps in the dump is barely contained. Yet there is a careful reserve about him, a latent philosopher, and a wonderful unshaven virility that attracts the audience, and soon, Carole Lombard. He was never more sexy than in this movie.

She is first awed by him, and smitten, especially when he backs Gail Patrick into a pile of ashes. Gail is a haughty, arrogant rich brat who irritates Powell with the condescending offer of $5 to Powell if he will accompany her back to the Waldorf to be inspected by the prize committee as a genuine bum. Uh, forgotten man.

There is no love lost between the sisters. Carole’s delight at seeing her sister humiliated, as well as her more sensitive and shy request that Powell be her forgotten man, makes Mr. Powell allow her the privilege of capturing him.

At the party he sees the wealthy class in an orgy of junk collecting to win a prize.  He finds himself put on display, a little like a slave at a slave market when Franklin Pangborn strokes his cheek to see if the whiskers are real. Powell calls them “empty-headed nitwits” and Carole’s simple conscience, when it exists, realizes he has been humiliated. She feels guilty, and decides to bring him to her parents’ mansion to give him a job as their butler.

Of such simple stuff is excellent screwball comedy made.

Alice Brady, no sensible earth mother as we last saw her in “In Old Chicago” here, plays a society woman ten times ditzier than Carole Lombard.

Mischa Auer, in the “mad Russian” role he patented, plays a social parasite Alice Brady takes into their home as her protégé. He is a musician when he is not eating, or doing gorilla impersonations.

Eugene Pallette, he of the lordly, imposing girth and the foghorn vocal chords, plays the husband and father, and keeper of the keys to this nuthouse. The 1930s longsuffering rich guy, out of step in a world undisciplined and nutty. He is left paying the check.

Jean Dixon, longsuffering herself, plays their maid with that typical 1930s wisecracking sensibility that keeps us all levelheaded. I love the scene where she lovingly sews a button on Powell’s jacket, and Lombard strokes the sleeve. “It’s his, isn’t it?” Powell is unaware of the harem he has made of the household females.

Our beloved Grady Sutton (see this previous post), has a brief role as the bewildered fellow Carole Lombard takes as a fiancé for spite when William Powell exhibits no interest in her.

William Powell, it is disclosed to us, but not his employers, is not really a servant. He is from an upper class Boston family. He ran away after a failed romance, intending to kill himself. When he stumbled upon the destitute in the Hooverville, he instead learned a less about life and the grit and nobility of survival. He takes the butler’s job as part of his own self-rehabilitation -- part therapy and part penance, and he applies himself with diligence to his job. He is a very good butler.

We might remark that the rich people in this movie are child-like and foolish, and irresponsible and we may wonder if the audiences of the 1930s were disgusted or ridiculing of the upper class because of it. How could people like this be running the show? On the other hand, we have their neighbors in the lower class section of town, the Sycamore family of “You Can’t Take It With You” in their own self-imposed fantasy world of foolishness. Mischa Auer, you’ll remember, shows up as the perennial guest for dinner in that one, too.

I wonder if “Ochi Chornya” (pick your favorite spelling) or “Dark Eyes” could be considered a minor anthem of the 1930s? We hear it in so many movies of the day, including repeated bursts from music boxes in “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940) here.

Another musical reference we may note is Alice Brady’s musing that nobody knows the words to “The Star Spangled Banner”. It had become officially our national anthem only in 1931, five years before this movie was made.

Perhaps my most favorite topical reference from this movie, because it turns to be just as relevant today, is when Powell responds to his business partner’s question, “When do you start paying dividends?”

He replies, “Well, we’re giving food and shelter to 50 people in the winter and giving them employment in the summer. What do you want in the way of dividends?”

And the Art Deco nightclub they build over the old landfill is called The Dump.

The lines are fast and furious, and funny, and subplots include Mr. Powell’s plan to rehabilitate the dump just as he has rehabilitated himself and get his homeless friends there jobs. Meanwhile, the evil sister, Gail Patrick, plots to have him arrested for stealing her pearl necklace, which she plants in his room.

It is refreshing, in an odd way, to see two sisters really dislike each other and be shown as truly incompatible. “Yah! Yah! Yah!” as Miss Lombard would shout. Her incorrigible sweetness mixed with a cloying immaturity is a tough balance to maintain, but Carole Lombard does it well and probably better than anyone else could. William Powell knew this, and so when this project came up, he pushed for Lombard to get the part. That they were divorced in real life clearly made no problems in their chemistry for this movie.

Powell has chemistry with everybody in this movie, including the nasty Gail Patrick, and even poor Jean Dixon is so lovesick for him by the end of the movie, she and Lombard sob in each other arms over his leaving.

But it is Gail Patrick’s character I find more interesting. For all her meanness, the spark of attraction she feels for Powell is intriguing. Her encounters with him in the drawing room, and at the bar where she intrudes upon his meeting with a friend from the old days are snide but sexy jousts. She knows he has a secret and wants to ferret it out, ostensibly to humiliate him, to take revenge for his backing her onto her bum in the ash pile at the beginning of the movie.

She bullies him, she threatens him, she insults him. She uses her womanly wiles against him. He is impervious, and, in a superior and classy way tells her off, and this drives her nuts and makes him more attractive to her. In the end, another subplot reveals that Powell, through his own private scheme to raise money, has also saved her father from bankruptcy and a possible jail sentence.

Miss Patrick’s steel butterfly persona melts under the realization that Powell is their savior. Gratitude, contrition, and humility wash over her, and that is what really saves her as a human being. We wonder what kind of person she will turn out to be now that she has undergone a conversion. With Lombard’s character, we may assume both her unflappable charm and her childish tantrums will continue without change.

If we weren’t talking about the great Carole Lombard, I would say I preferred Patrick to end up with Powell at the end. But, it’s sweet, ditzy Carol that captures, truly this time, William Powell and leads him into wedlock before he knows what’s happening. In time she may end up being a carbon copy of her mother and Powell a copy of her longsuffering father.

That infectious, almost maniacal giggle bursts forth from her at the very end of the movie when Powell is ten seconds away from saying “I do”. Lombard makes this childish ditz lovable, so it is no wonder she gets away with it. And unlike Gail Patrick, who leads men around on a leash, Lombard needs someone to look after her. Naughty girl that she is.

Don't forget to check out the rest of the great blogs participating in the Carole Lombard blogathon.

What's a Rich Girl to Do? - prelude

For the next couple of posts, beginning on Thursday and concluding next Monday, we’ll be discussing a peculiar predicament of wealthy women in the movies. They are either married for their money, or murdered for the same.

Since most of us don’t have to worry about these extra burdens of extreme inherited wealth, this scenario is one of fantasy, as fanciful as the “madcap heiresses” whose lives were also impossible to identify with, but who we might accept more affably as equals simply because they were so fun and so goofy.

What happened to those other rich girls, the freewheeling spoiled brats who charmed us with their irresponsibility? The wonderful Carole Lombard in “My Man Godfrey” (1936) or Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night” (1934), those two madcap heiresses with moxie whose silliness got us through the hard knock life of the Great Depression, they are gone.

They grew up, and grew serious, or perhaps we shrugged them off when we finally learned the value of money ourselves, now that we had a little, in the post-War years. The films we’ll use to examine the plight of the rich girl who is pursued for her fortune are “The Heiress” (1949) and “Invitation” (1952), and both give us an interesting twist on the empowerment of women, both economically and emotionally, who are otherwise vulnerable in mirror reflections of society one hundred years apart.

Then we’ll examine the rich wives whom their husbands intend to murder with the films “Dial M for Murder” (1954) and its remake “A Perfect Murder” (1998). Though usually for purposes of this blog, anything that happened after 1960 didn’t happen, a brief foray into the 1990s will make an interesting contrast to show what has changed in film audiences' expectations for rich girls in the decades between then and now.

Some things, clearly, have not changed much for the rich girl. In the post-war tradition of the movies, she’s still a meal ticket, dead or alive.

Twentieth Century (1934)

This post is part of the Howard Hawks Blog-a-thon over at Only the Cinema. Please have a look at the other interesting posts on this very talented director's early career.

Adapted from a Broadway play, Twentieth Century (1934) is at once a postcard from the past, a world of luxury train travel and screwball comedy, and is also a timeless valentine to screwballs and eccentrics of every stripe.

There are plenty of them in this movie.

John Barrymore plays a delightful egomaniac theater impresario, who discovers in a shy and clumsy Carole Lombard his latest project of self glorification, to turn her into a star. This he does, with much coaching, bullying, and jabbing her in the bottom with the pin from her corsage to make her scream to his satisfaction at the appropriate moment in the script.

From the flies of the theater, the catwalk above the stage, he watches her on opening night perform to thunderous applause. In her dressing room afterwards, he declares on his knee, his adulation for her as an artist. She returns his humble tribute by showing him how, with gratitude, she has enshrined the pin with which he assaulted her, on a heart-shaped cushion. Every scene, nearly every line from then on is a parody of the effusive natures in the world of theatre.

After a few years of hits, Miss Lombard, now Mr. Barrymore’s lover, bristles under his obsessive control, takes her own now considerable ego out of their elegant Manhattan digs and heads for success in Hollywood. After a few years of failure without her, Mr. Barrymore catches the same train she is taking to return to New York to woo her, or trick her, whichever works, into signing a new contract with him.

Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns are terrific as the king’s bumbling courtiers. Also appearing are Charles Lane, who as previously mentioned on this blog had a part in every movie ever made, I’m pretty sure, and Etienne Girardot as the nutty reformer who plasters “Repent” notices on the train windows, on the backs of detectives, and on the unfortunate Mr. Connolly’s hat.

The lines fly fast and furious, and most are not so topical that they cannot be easily understood today. Silliness has no expiration date. However, younger audiences might not catch the significance of “The 20th Century Limited,” which was the name of the train. It was the top of the line in train travel in an era where everybody took the train. Film stars habitually took "The 20th Century” from New York to Chicago, and then took the Chief or Super Chief the rest of the way to Los Angeles.

The train left each city in early afternoon, took about 20 hours to reach either New York or Chicago the following morning. It was the most elegantly appointed, had the best food, and was the most expensive. It was a world unto itself.

John Barrymore was called The Great Profile in his day, and either to take advantage of his still handsome looks or to play upon this nickname, he is seen in profile for most of this movie. This was probably John Barrymore’s best performance in films, and perhaps partly due to his own penchant for mockery. Never seeming to completely take himself seriously, this notoriously heavy drinking, womanizing bad boy of the theater also represented the prestige of America’s theatrical “royal” family, and was himself the Hamlet of a generation. Barrymore could not seem to reconcile the two, and brought his sardonic edge and his boyish humor to a role he understood very well.

Five years after this movie was made, when his drinking took his health and his fortunes, and his acting to new lows, John Barrymore gave another theatrical performance mocking both the theater and himself. He toured in a play called My Dear Children where he began to seem to forget lines, ad libbed obscenities, and appeared to be drunk on stage. According to The Barrymores by Hollis Alpert (The Dial Press:NY, 1964), young ingénue Dorothy McGuire left the show, complaining to director Otto Preminger, “I had great admiration for John Barrymore when we started, but I cannot watch this man making a fool of himself.”

Here is an interesting clip of a radio interview Mr. Barrymore did in Omaha, Nebraska referring effusively both to Miss McGuire and her mother. If Barrymore’s stage drunkenness was an act, he continued it here.

Audiences began to flock to the play, not to be thrilled by the great John Barrymore, but expecting to watch him in a (no pun intended) train wreck of a performance. Otto Preminger rebuked him, and when Barrymore performed perfectly the next night, Preminger asked why he didn’t perform this way every night. Barrymore is quoted as replying, “Bored, dear boy.” He is Oscar Jaffe on the skids, playing with the whole notion of the theater as art and as an occupation, like a bored kid with a paddle ball.

Mr. Alpert’s book also refers to Howard Hawks’ 1963 interview in Cinema magazine where both Hawks and Barrymore were initially disappointed in Carole Lombard in the role of the temperamental actress, finding her too stiff. But when she was encouraged to let go and be more natural and really fight with Barrymore, both men were pleased with her comedic timing.

One of the best scenes is when Barrymore tries to entice her back to his company by promising her the lead in a new production of the Passion Play. This one, however, is all about Mary Magdalene, and all about her. His eloquent and over-the-top descriptions of getting real camels, as he imitates the way camels chew, and getting real sand from the Holy Land, is hysterical. At first she is swept away by his fantasy, and then we see she sees right through him. He leaps away from her kicks.

Another superb scene is when he is accidentally shot, and though the wound is superficial, he plays a grand death scene, savoring it, and almost seems to believe it himself. This is the true genius of the way Barrymore plays the role. Like a man who knows the theater, knows himself, and knows how to manipulate reality, he sometimes is so swept away by what he himself is making up, he almost thinks it real.

The script is literate and silly, but Howard Hawks brings even more to the script by following this fine line of believing the silliness. Lombard’s role is not just a shrewish diva. She believes in theater, and in Barrymore. They know it is artificial, and a touching scene reminds us they know. But like children, they believe because they very much want to believe.

Barrymore’s character could just be a loud-mouthed conman, but he isn’t. He’s an artist, every lie, every exaggeration is art. He continually creates the work of art that is himself. Just as the real John Barrymore did.

Ironically, we lost both Carole Lombard and John Barrymore a few months apart in 1942. "The 20th Century Limited” train was discontinued in 1967. Younger old movie buffs know or will learn about the talent of Carole Lombard and John Barrymore because film makes actors immortal. They’ll probably never understand how significant for both a title and a setting was the train, “The 20th Century.”

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century.