George Stevens (1938)
This comedy may not technically qualify as screwball but the romantic pairing – an academic hero in need of a sentimental education and a sparky, more worldly-wise heroine – inevitably brings to mind Bringing Up Baby (released just a few weeks earlier in 1938) and Ball of Fire – and, to a lesser extent, The Lady Eve. A big difference in Vivacious Lady is how quickly the romance comes to fruition. Peter Morgan Jr (James Stewart), an associate professor of botany, is in New York to find his playboy cousin Keith (James Ellison) and return him home to Old Sharon, the college town where they live. Having tracked Keith down to a Manhattan night club, Peter telephones his father with the good news. He has to shout down the phone to drown out the voice of a club singer performing close at hand. Peter finishes the call and notices the chanteuse, Francey Brent (Ginger Rogers), who then directs her looks and lyrics towards him. Francey comes to sit with Peter; they talk for a while before leaving the club together. It’s a surprise to see James Stewart’s Peter yield to love at first sight before your eyes – surely shaking him out of his staid, donnish habits is the challenge for Ginger Rogers’s Francey that will occupy nearly the whole ninety minutes of Vivacious Lady? The next surprise eliminates that first one. Peter and Francey get married the following day.
All that remains now is for the groom to inform his parents – the overbearing Peter Morgan Sr (Charles Coburn), president of the university where his son is a member of the faculty, and his wife Martha (Beulah Bondi), whose heart condition causes her to take ill whenever her husband raises his voice, which isn’t rarely. Peter Jr brings Francey back to Old Sharon (a fictional place, possibly inspired by Sharon, New Hampshire?), without anyone there knowing she’s his bride, and without his bride knowing Peter also has a fiancée, Helen (Frances Mercer) – ‘The old man whipped her up – blue blood, a thoroughbred’. That description of Helen comes from Keith, the only other person in on the happy couple’s secret. He proves a good egg, considering that, when Peter first ran him to earth in the Manhattan club, Keith was in drunken raptures about Francey, assured Peter she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever met, and engineered that first conversation with Francey purely as a joke on his serious-minded cousin. The stage is set for a New York vs Old Sharon culture clash, for the uproar that’s bound to result from Morgan Sr finding out the truth, and bound to give Mrs Morgan another nasty turn.
You wonder if Vivacious Lady’s comic basis will be too slender for the humour not to wear thin, but this doesn’t happen. The long-delayed revelation to the Morgan parents of their son’s marriage, when it finally happens, is amusing twice over. Peter manages to inform his father just as Morgan Sr is about to deliver a speech designed to seal the deal on a major donation to the university from a rich alumnus (Lloyd Ingraham). Francey tells Mrs Morgan only because the latter has just assured her, ‘I know all about it’, though she doesn’t. Speedy matrimony doesn’t pre-empt the setbacks on which romantic comedy depends: there are as many bumps in the road for Francey and Peter as there would have been if he’d brought her home as a girlfriend. The screenplay, by P J Wolfson and Ernest Pagano (from a story by I A R Wylie), is well supplied with witty incidents and lively minor characters. George Stevens’s direction is nimble but never frenetic.
Stevens’s expertise as a director of 1930s comedy, grounded in his work as cameraman on numerous Laurel and Hardy shorts, makes it all the more striking that he switched so thoroughly to drama later in his career (according to Wikipedia, there are no comic scenes in any of his post-war films after I Remember Mama (1948)). The 2017 Netflix documentary series Five Came Back, based on Mark Harris’s book, stresses the traumatic legacy of Stevens’s experiences as a film-maker in wartime (as the head of a film unit under Eisenhower, he shot footage of Dachau and other Nazi camps). Watching Alice Adams or Swingtime or Vivacious Lady, as well as being highly enjoyable, sharpens your awareness of how deeply the tenor of Stevens’s screen material changed.
In Ball of Fire, Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea, a night club performer and gangster’s moll, may be the outsider in the ivory tower where she takes refuge (from the police who want her for questioning) but she dominates the place. Ginger Rogers’s Francey, for all her feistiness, is more of an underdog newcomer to academia. As well as being funny (and dancing briefly), Rogers blends toughness – a catfight between Francey and Helen is startlingly vigorous – with a vulnerable awareness of how much she offends the Old Sharon status quo. The vulnerability doesn’t turn mushy – until the climax of the story, when the mushiness is played for laughs. Francey returns alone and heartbroken to New York. She eventually discovers that in the next-door train compartment is Mrs Morgan, who has lost patience with and walked out on her bullying husband, and, like Francey, is weeping bucketsful. On their very first meeting, on the margins of a college gathering, the two women literally share a cigarette: Francey offers the one remaining in her case and Mrs Morgan divides it in two. This is nicely reprised on the New York train, as a clue to Francey of who her neighbour is. The travelling companions cheer themselves up even before the Peters Jr and Sr board the train to deliver a happy ending for all concerned.
All except the wronged fiancée, that is. Frances Mercer has an exceptionally thankless task: Helen is a snob, a scold and a sneak. It’s grimly amusing that, despite his vehement opposition to his son’s marriage, Peter’s father never says, ‘What about poor Helen?’ When the latter tells his mother she caught Peter leaving, in the small hours, the hostel for women students where Francey is now holed up, it’s enough for the invalid to rise from her sick bed and head for the hostel to sort things out. That’s when she accidentally finds out that Francey is her daughter-in-law. A delighted Mrs Morgan instantly forgets about Helen. She also confides in Francey that her weak heart is a put-on, though a necessary means to marital survival.
Charles Coburn is first-rate as Morgan Sr, Beulah Bondi more surprisingly effective as his wife: Bondi seems to relish, as much as Mrs Morgan does, her zany dance routine with Ginger Rogers and the likeable James Ellison. Franklin Pangborn is wonderful as the officious but easily scared manager of the no-men-allowed hostel. Hattie McDaniel has an uncredited appearance as (of course) a maid. Willie Best is the increasingly perplexed New York train porter who tries his level best, with ham sandwiches and the one cigarette he can lay his hands on, to alleviate the misery of the ladies in adjoining compartments. Best’s racially self-demeaning routine is a brake on enjoyment of the train episode, which is such fun in other ways.
Two years after Vivacious Lady, its stars won Best Actor and Actress awards at the same Oscars ceremony in different films (The Philadelphia Story and Kitty Foyle respectively). They’re a fine comedy partnership; it’s a shame they didn’t work together again. James Stewart, who was just coming up thirty at the time, looks even younger – it makes sense of the set-up that Ginger Rogers seems a bit older (though she was actually Stewart’s junior by three years). Stewart is so much more appealing an actor when, as here, his essential rectitude is used light-heartedly. One of his and Rogers’s best exchanges comes in the hostel. The fold-down bed in Francey’s room has a mind of its own, smacking down from the wall whenever a door or drawer shuts. It even has a name of its own – Walter, after the late husband of the hostel maid (Helena Grant) who, his widow explains, had a habit of falling over. As Peter keeps delaying his departure from the room and Francey hers to New York, they keep hoping the bed will do its stuff. They even slam doors to encourage it. Walter refuses and stays firmly in the wall. This sequence isn’t only funny. It also functions as an exasperated comment on Hays Code constraints on bedroom scenes, whether those in the bedroom were married or not.
20 May 2020
