Monday, June 21, 2010
It’s entirely possible that the first time I watched Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (Universal, 1936), I was so awestruck by the film’s star, the impossibly elegant William Powell, that I overlooked the film’s primary flaw: It’s too screwball by half.
That extra half might be attributed largely to Powell’s leading lady (and, by the time Godfrey was filmed, ex-wife), Carole Lombard, whom I recall being charmed by when I first discovered the film but who grates the nerves somewhat on subsequent viewing.
It’s not entirely Lombard’s fault, though: The script by Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind seems to count on Lombard’s near-universal appeal to sell a character who is not actually as lovable as the film wants her to be. Her performance, therefore, is the template for a character that would be perfected a couple of years later by Katharine Hepburn in Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby: the dizzy socialite who doggedly asserts her interest in a leading man who is otherwise engaged or preoccupied.
But while the latter film gains its headlong momentum from the pursuit of not one but two MacGuffins — paleontologist David Huxley’s (Cary Grant) prized intercostal clavicle and Susan Vance’s (Hepburn) runaway leopard, Baby — My Man Godfrey is primarily a drawing-room comedy in which the only thing being pursued is Godfrey himself: Spoiled socialite Irene Bullock (Lombard) is unaccountably infatuated with him from the moment they meet cute during an unlikely high-society scavenger-hunt foray to the city dump and thereafter hires him to be her family’s butler; the rest of the Bullocks are intrigued by the question of their new manservant’s true identity.
Because the plot seldom strays outside the Bullock home, most of the comedy is driven by the verbal antics of mother Angelica (Alice Brady); the brooding inanity of her protégé, the talentless composer Carlo (Mischa Auer); the gruff exasperation of father and benefactor Alexander (the great character actor Eugene Pallette); and Irene’s own petulant histrionics. One wishes that Lombard’s character were straighter and more obviously cunning (see Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night), both to balance the hysterics of the aforementioned supporting cast and to present a worthier foil to older sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick), who poses the greatest threat to Godfrey’s secret.
That Powell’s Godfrey — intelligent, urbane, witty, cleans up nicely — is the object of desire in this story is not surprising. That he should in turn desire the precocious, flighty and entirely too forthright Irene, notwithstanding his stated and implied affection for her, is the more problematic plot point. On the one hand a Depression-era entertainment that makes buffoons of the wealthy as it salutes the down-trodden, My Man Godfrey is clearly intended to be a romantic comedy, but Godfrey himself — motivated as he is by other, nobler objectives — appears not to have gotten the memo.
The film’s ending, then, has the curious effect of giving the audience exactly what it wants (or is led to believe it wants), of giving Irene exactly what she wants, even as Godfrey, having achieved exactly what he set out to do, holds himself at a remove from the movie’s romantic agenda. The film resolves the matter once and for all without having previously trafficked in the sort of sexual tension and chemistry that drives the best romantic comedies. Its only concession is a slightly open-ended fade-out that allows one to imagine Godfrey already plotting his escape from the amorous clutches of the dotty Irene. But we’re supposed to want them to be together, right?
Ultimately, the movie’s greatness — and it is still great, despite my diminished opinion of its mechanics and execution — lies mostly in the performance of William Powell, who walks into the midst of this bedlam and plays the straight man with such precise timing and effortless grace that, rather than disappear amid the chaos as a lesser actor might, he heightens the comedy and often earns the laugh simply by cocking an eyebrow or attempting to leave a room he has just entered. In some instances, Powell’s mere presence serves to make the comedy more sophisticated than it ought to be.
Given the current state of movie comedies, we could use a William Powell or two in Hollywood today.
