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.

Carole Lombard Blogathon and Other Stuff

This is a brief reminder of the Carole Lombard blogathon sponsored by Carole & Company, which begins this Thursday.  My contribution will be a look at "My Man Godfrey".  Have a look here for the list of participants.

And a couple of other notes:   Last summer I wrote about an exhibit of Norman Rockwell's work involving Hollywood subjects called "Rockwell and the Movies", here.  I managed to get to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts this weekend (actually for another exhibit), and sneaked a peak at the enormous painting of Jennifer Jones from "The Song of Bernadette" (1943).  The image depicts her character in contemplative awe at the moment of seeing her vision of the Virgin Mary.  One is always struck by the detail of Rockwell's photographic-style of illustration, and his likeness of Jennifer Jones is the best I've ever seen.  What made the painting more remarkable is that he adds that slightly subjective drama to the expression on her face and the stillness of her body that makes image go beyond merely photographic.  It enhances the image and enraptures the viewer.  His simulation of her simulation of seeing a heavenly vision is deeply moving.

Close by was the excellent depiction of Tyrone Power from "A Razor's Edge". 

Art is inevitably subjective.  In another gallery, an exhibit of animation from the Blue Sky studio contained a video presentation of some short cartoons made from the late 1980s to the present.  An elderly couple sat down in empty chairs in front of the small screen, I think simply to rest.  During a series of cartoons about a hapless squirrell whose fast-moving, slapstick adventures left him in constant danger while trying to protect his supply of acorns, this elderly couple bust a gut laughing.  I never expected them to enjoy this rapid-fire lunacy.

I was more amazed by the little girl who wandered in to watch, probably about 7 years old.  She remained stone-faced during the entire set of cartoons, occasionally sneaking glances at the elderly couple and smiling a little at them as one does in antipation at another person's laughter, and then bringing her eyes back, dubiously, at the screen as if wondering what was so funny.  Eventually, she became bored, and slipped on the earphones, and listened to her iPod, lost in a world she preferred and did not have to share.

Something tells me this child is never going to enjoy screwball comedy like Carole Lombard.  But I hope life will treat her gently and she may discover, as the elderly couple have, the delight of such simplistic irony and the utterly human joy of laughing at ourselves.  That's the secret, little one.  We're not really laughing at the squirrel, we're laughing at ourselves because we know how he feels.  We've been there on really bad days.

If the couple were her grandparents, I think they could take her in hand and show her in time by their glorious example.  But they were strangers to her, and she will never see them again.  In a moment, her father came in, a man likely in his middle 30s but dressed like a boy, the kind of person who bolts through museum exhibits like a man checking off an obligatory grocery list.  There.  I've got that done.  Now let's get out of here.

One more thing, my short story "Constancy", available as an ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, Sony, etc., was recently reviewed on the book review blog Red Adept Reviews, accompanied by an interview, here.

See you Thursday for "My Man Godfrey". 

Dressed to Kill - 1946

“Dressed to Kill” (1946) is the final “Sherlock Holmes” film starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, capping a series of 14 movies. That’s enough reason watch, but you may find watching difficult as copies of this public domain movie are not in great condition.

I’ll not go too deep into the plot as anything is likely to be a spoiler in a mystery. The story unfolds, however, in a nice way that lets us see the clues at the same time Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson do. In a lot of mysteries, movies as well as books, there are facts not revealed to us until the end, but the deduction has a real-time feel here. We know as much as they do. Mr. Rathbone is the cerebral and unemotional Mr. Holmes, and Mr. Bruce is the jovial Dr. Watson, who chronicles Sherlock’s exploits in the Strand.

A prison inmate makes plain wooden music boxes, and they are sold at auction to collectors and toy store owners. We eventually discover that the music boxes contain clues to hidden plates that were used in a forgery scheme. His gang on the outside are retrieving the music boxes to get the clues, to get the plates.

Though the series was fun, I was never quite reconciled to placing Sherlock outside his Victorian era. The only time we see his deerstalker hat in this movie is a brief glimpse in the background, resting on a wig stand. It looks a little sad.

Dr. Watson, again, provides the comic relief, particularly when comforting a little girl they’ve rescued. He is left to babysit and tries to amuse her by making duck sounds. This distresses her more.

His old school chum “Stinky”, played by Edmund Breon, drops by. He happens to be a music box collector and so finds himself tangled in the mystery. Dr. Watson may have the friend with the funny name, but Stinky is Public School and patrician all the same, despite his goofiness.

Sherlock, on the other hand, has friends in lower society, such as the busker in the pub for street singers who helps him trace a tune from a music box as a clue. He’s a scruffy-looking fellow, but all business and with far more dignity than the clownish Stinky.

The title of the movie, which doesn’t sound like a Sherlock Holmes story at all (unless somebody was murdered during Fashion Week in NYC), comes from the villain’s wearing disguises to commit crimes.

Patricia Morison plays a music box buyer who visits their bachelor pad, and becomes a problem, as women will be, particularly with bachelors.

Mary Gordon is back as Mrs. Hudson, their housekeeper at 221B Baker Street.

The plot moves briskly along, and at one point Basil Rathbone must work his way out of a “certain death” trap like Houdini. This scene is actually the most chilling in the movie; not for his struggle to escape, but because the bad guys who tie him up leave him in a room with a canister of poison gas. He is told, “The Germans used it with gratifying results in removing their undesirables.”

This was early 1946, when the horrors of the Nazi regime were still raw and still being uncovered. A startling and somewhat sickening line.

For a generation, and generations afterward, Basil Rathbone WAS Sherlock Holmes. For a look at the man who held the title before him, visit my New England Travels blog for Tuesday’s post on William Gillette, who played Sherlock on stage in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He coined many of the attributes we think of when we think of Sherlock Holmes, and built an extraordinary castle on the Connecticut River.

Any Number Can Play - 1949

"Any Number Can Play" (1949) is a spot-the-character-actor festival.  Shown recently on TCM, I came in late, after the opening credits, and knowing nothing about the film, I had a ball picking out character actors I knew or thought I knew.

The leads, to be sure, are enough of a draw.  Clark Gable is a the owner of a gambling house, who spends too much time at work, and whose attacks of angina point to stress and serious heart trouble if he doesn't take it easy. 

Alexis Smith is his wife, who has grown lonelier through the years in his absence, and especially now that her son is almost grown.   Darryl Hickman plays their boy, who is angry at his father for being absent, being the town notorious clip joint owner, and for wanting him to fight other kids when he has no desire to punch anybody. 

There seems to be a lot of emphasis on Gable's disappointment in his son's lack of a brawling gene (there is a toy model of two boxers in a ring on Gable's desk), and his resentment at being resented.

There's not a lot of action; it's a quiet movie, an interesting study of a man not only feeling his age but feeling his mortality, along with a lot of brief side glimpses at the desperation of addicted gamblers and the nature of life as being one big gamble.

This is our post-War Gable, older and looking it, but still with that incredible magnetism.  When he walks through the crowded gambling salon, he's the only person you watch.

Unfortunately Alexis Smith doesn't get to stretch her acting muscles much in this film, except for one very lovely scene.  Gable rumages among the junk in the cellar of their mansion looking for a set of old fishing flies for a long-postponed vacation his doctor says he should take or else.  Alexis leads him off to a side room in the cellar she has fixed up for herself.  She calls it a memory room.

It is a small hideway, a looking almost like a camping cottage.  There are a few pieces of mismatched old furnature, a phonograph, a baby's wooden highchair, and an old double bed that had been theirs in the small apartment they had when they were first married.  All the items are from the early years of their marriage, including the box of fishing flies Gable wants.

He is astonished, and she explains in a low, almost whispered voice that she misses the days when they were together more, when he was just starting out in business, and when they shared all their thoughts and experiences.  Her pain and her disapointment, and her frustration at having to be the linchpin between her estranged husband and son, are mitigated only by her great love for this man.  He flops on the lumpy mattress and she joins him, still whispering between kisses, a very touching seduction scene (We can only suppose she's keeping one foot on the floor).   She is more impressive in this scene than Gable, whose normal tone of speaking voice seems almost a shout compared to her softer tones, and he looks uncomfortable.  He's the rogue of younger days, chasing women in between wisecracks, and does not seem to like being seduced.

However his later scene with Mary Astor, as an old flame who still pines for him, is more profound and shows Gable as lonely as his wife.  One interesting thing about this movie is that, despite Gable's obvious magnestim before the camera, he must also have slipped the cameraman a buck or two because in several scenes he is shown facing the camera and we see only the back of the person talking to him.  This happens most glaringly with Mary Astor, who plays much of their one scene together with her back to us.  Mary Astor, of all people.

Knowing nothing about this film, and missing the opening credits, Mary Astor pulling on the arm of a slot machine was only one happy surprise.  The rest of the movie  became an Easter egg hunt for familiar faces.

Frank Morgan has a great role as an aggressive gambler, a rival and enemy to Gable, who intends to clean him out.  Morgan is a far cry from his normal jovial roles.  He's menacing, snide, sarcastic, but ultimately respecting Gable for playing the game of life as hard as he does.  Mr. Morgan died only two months after "Any Number Can Play" was released.

Leon Ames is the doctor who tells Gable to cut out bad habits (including work) or he's a goner.  Lewis Stone plays the town drunk, who borrows money from Gable, and loses everything at poker.  If you had no idea Judge Hardy could act, have a look at this movie.

Wendell Corey plays Gable's no-account brother-in-law (married to sis Audrey Totter, who doesn't get much to do expect drink and look bitter).  Mr. Corey is a smarmy weakling, who works at Gable's gambling house and is skimming money for himself.  He's gotten in trouble with a couple of hoods.  William Conrad is one of them.  ("Hey!  William Conrad!" she shouts to the TV like a happy idiot.)

Marjorie Rambeau is the town rich lady with an earthy love of gambling.   Edgar Buchanan is one of the patrons, but I don't think he had any lines.  We just see him looking tense at the poker table from time to time.  ("Hey!  It's Edgar Buchanan!")

Caleb Peterson is the simple-minded bar guy, who we sense is another one of Gable's charity cases.  We caught a brief glimpse of Mr. Peterson as the African-American veteran who helped move the heavy plane engine at  the beginning of "The Best Years of Our Lives."

That's William Edmunds as the men's room attendant - remember Mr. Martini from "It's a Wonderful Life"?

That photo in Gable's office of his son as a little boy  -that's not a young Darryl Hickman.  That's a young Scotty Becket.  You recognize him right off, and it threw me.  I spent the rest of the movie wondering when Scotty Becket would show up

Barbara Billingsly is supposed to be a gambler, too, but I didn't see her anywhere.  Instead, I saw a couple people who weren't there.  I thought I recognized one fellow as Leon Belasco, and another as Regis Toomey, at least from profile - but IMDb doesn't list them in the credits. 

I got so hung up on hunting for character actors at that point, I was starting to see things.



Five Things You Like about Classic Films

JT Lynch photo

Back in the early days of this blog, we put our heads together and came up with lists of things about old movies we liked (and I can’t link to the post offhand because I can’t find it just now) -- that had nothing to do with great actors, directors, or quality of writing. Just the superficial stuff. Since it’s been a while, and since we have so many new readers, I’d like to play the game again. Give me five random examples of what you like about things you see in classic films. I’ll start. It’s my blog.


(Trumpet fanfare) --

STUFF I LIKE ABOUT OLD MOVIES:

1. Flipping calendar pages to mark the passage of time.

2. “Swell.”

3. “Darling.”

4. Candlestick telephones.

5. Wisecracking chorus girls.

Now you go.

An Ache in Every Stake - 1941

“An Ache in Every Stake” (1941) presents The Three Stooges as icemen, who struggle to carry a block of ice up a long outdoor set of concrete stairs before it melts. Such are the simple plots that make The Three Stooges shorts easy enough to entertain children, which is why most children love the Stooges and then grow out of it when they realize they’re not supposed to like something this dumb.

This post is my entry for the Guilty Pleasures Blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. Have a look here for a list of other blogs participating in this fun event.

However, I wouldn’t say that watching “An Ache in Every Stake”, directed by Del Lord, is really a “guilty” pleasure, as I guess I’m blissfully untroubled by too many of those. With a Stooge-like simplicity, I grew up with the idea that if I liked something, it was automatically “cool”. This covers a pretty large range.

I like the Stooges. These shorts are decried as being violent, which of course they are. But Moe, Curly, and Larry (and other stand-in Stooges off the bench) were never mean, devious, or sinister. They were just stupid. They reacted quickly, like children, to frustration, slapping each other or grabbing each other’s heads with ice tongs in an effort to encourage the offending party to cooperate.

It was always about cooperation. The boys were a team, and their mission here as icemen is to deliver that block of ice to a housekeeper, played by Blanche Payson, so high above them she needs a megaphone to shout her order.

They like their jobs. In any Three Stooges short, you’ll see them working at a variety of jobs, mostly unskilled labor. Films today don’t often show characters who like their jobs, especially “working stiff” type jobs. The Stooges bear none of the, for today, typical resentment and anger, or malice at their jobs. Perhaps because in the Depression they are glad to have any job; perhaps they are just too stupid to know they will never get rich driving an ice wagon.

Perhaps, like me, they are blissfully unaware that driving an ice wagon is not something so great.

But I think it’s their innate childlike pleasure when they accomplish a task that makes them happy people, if not terribly successful.

Not that they accomplish too many tasks well, but one must admire their perseverance.

Their most endearing quality is their willingness to help others, seen in “An Ache in Every Stake” when they suddenly put aside their icemen jobs to prepare a birthday dinner for the master of the house because the tempermental chef, played by Gino Corrado, has quit. Right after the food fight.

The man of the house is played by Vernon Dent, on whom they have already accidently smashed two birthday cakes he was trying to bring home to the party. (Toward the end of the film, they will explode another cake, filled with natural gas, in his face. They are nothing if not consistent.)

His wife, played by Bess Flowers, is distraught about her servant trouble, wanting the party to go well. The Stooges, ever chivalrous where a lady is concerned, don chefs’ outfits and start to cook the dinner and bake the cake. That none of them has experience in this field, has never attended a culinary institute, has never even watched an afternoon of cooking shows on PBS, is irrelevant. The boys must help somehow.

When Curly reads directions he is to separate two eggs, he of course, takes two eggs and places them apart from each other. Something I inevitably call to mind when separating egg whites from the yolks, chuckling with idiotic pleasure.

Bess Flowers, incidentally, has the distinction of being in about a zillion movies as an extra, usually with no lines. Some of the films we’ve already discussed on this blog in which she’s had roles include “Rear Window”, “Dial M for Murder”, “Executive Suite”, “Calamity Jane”, “Here Comes the Groom”, and “Double Indemnity.” In “Cry Wolf”, she’s the woman in the painting on the wall.

So, if the respected Queen of the Extras does not discriminate between A-list films and The Three Stooges, who are we to knock them?

Such is my appreciation for The Stooges and “An Ache in Every Stake” in particular, that I visited the site of those famous steps a few years ago. They are a public walkway (like a vertical alley) connecting a road at the bottom of the hill and a road at the top. It is a residential neighborhood, and as you can see by these photos, much more built up and overgrown than when the Stooges were here, failing to deliver a single block of ice.  They tried to carry a large ice box up the steps instead.  That didn't work out too well, either.  But, as always, high marks for trying.

(JT Lynch photo)

These steps are not marked with a sign noting them as a location shot for the Stooges, as the more famous “Music Box Steps” are that were featured in the Laurel and Hardy film. (Which I discussed in this previous post.) You can find the Stooge steps in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles between 2257 and 2258 Fair Oak View Terrace in a cul-de-sac. Have a look here at this website for more photos and an areal view of this location.

The blogger as tourist. (JT Lynch photo)

Speaking of film locations of Hollywood movies, have a look here at Dear Old Hollywood, which is a fun blog that tracks down the real-life spots in our favorite films.

The boys "toboggan" down past the landing where I stood in the above photo.

You can watch "An Ache in Every Stake" here on YouTube.