Gregory La Cava (1936)
This screwball comedy of the Depression starts brilliantly. I can’t think of another 1930s Hollywood film with such a witty and ingenious title sequence. The camera moves across a nightscape of the Brooklyn Bridge and buildings along the East River. The names of cast and crew appear in neon lights on the buildings and are gently reflected in the water below. The black-and-white vista has an Art Deco flavour but the lighting gives it the look of a modernised Doré illustration. That impression is reinforced as the images segue from graphic design into pictorial reality, before they turn to live action. On the soundtrack, Charles Previn’s jolly music gives way to the din of metal and glass hurtling down a heap of trash. In the darkness, this ‘looks like nothing so much as a landslide of diamonds’, in David Thomson’s apt phrase. The dump is cheek by jowl with Manhattan’s fashionable Sutton Place. And My Man Godfrey, in spite of what follows immediately after the credits, will focus on the haves rather than the have-nots of Depression New York.
The bravura opening continues in the first conversation, between two denizens of the dump. They don’t sound like your average vagrants. One, in particular, is well spoken. He assures the other that ‘prosperity’s just around the corner’. ‘Yeah, it’s been there a long time,’ replies the second man, ‘I wish I knew which corner’. They bid each other goodnight with ‘bonsoir’. The second down-and-out wanders off and a car pulls up. Two young women and a man, all in evening dress, get out and approach the hobo still in situ. One of the women offers him five dollars to accompany her to the Waldorf Ritz Hotel. When he asks to know more, the lady in furs explains she’s on a ‘scavenger hunt’, which will culminate in grand entertainment at the Waldorf Ritz: ‘If I find a forgotten man first, I win’.
This angers the cultured-sounding bum (William Powell). He moves forward to remonstrate with the woman (Gail Patrick), who steps then slips backwards onto a pile of ashes. She and her male companion leave in high dudgeon, to the amused delight of the other young woman (Carole Lombard). Introducing herself as Irene Bullock, she tells the hobo it was her sister Cornelia that he reduced to ash-pile indignity. Irene is the scatterbrained polar opposite of her imperious sister – and charming enough for the hobo, whose name is Godfrey, to agree to be her trophy from the hunt. Irene explains that, ‘In a treasure hunt you try to find something you want. In a scavenger hunt you try to find something that nobody wants’. Like a forgotten man.
Cut to the madhouse of the Waldorf Ritz, jam-packed with braying, yapping socialites. To call the place a zoo would be hard on non-human animals, a couple of which are in evidence. ‘Take a look at the dizzy old gal with the goat’, someone says to a morose, overweight, middle-aged man (Eugene Pallette). ‘I’ve had to look at her for years – that’s Mrs Bullock,’ replies Mr Bullock, the father of Irene and Cornelia. Their motor-mouth mother (Alice Brady) excitedly presents her goat, then its kid, found on the scavenger hunt, to the master of ceremonies (Franklin Pangborn). When Irene arrives with her objet trouvé Godfrey, the MC needs to pull his whiskers to check they’re genuine. Once that’s confirmed, there are calls for the best-in-show to make a speech and Godfrey obliges. He explains that he came to the hotel shindig partly to help Irene out and partly because:
‘I was curious to see how a bunch of empty-headed nitwits conducted themselves. My curiosity is satisfied. I assure you it will be a pleasure for me to go back to a society of really important people.’
He doesn’t return to the dump, though. When Irene apologises and offers him a job as the Bullock’s family butler, Godfrey accepts and moves in. I’ve majored on the opening scenes of My Man Godfrey because they’re in two senses exceptional. Nothing that follows in Gregory La Cava’s film, relentlessly entertaining and often inventive as it is, quite matches the startling social satire of the early stages. Godfrey is on his uppers for unusual reasons and the butler job is a means of continuing to conceal his true identity – in surroundings more comfortable than the dump. A scion of one of New York’s richest families (the Parkes of Park Avenue), he abandoned his former life as the result of an unhappy love affair rather than financial adversity. Godfrey wandered down to the East River, intending to drown himself. The vagrants at the dump, ‘fighting it out and not complaining’, changed his mind. He reveals this in a chance encounter with an old friend, Tommy Gray (Alan Mowbray), who, when he comes as a guest to a tea party thrown by Irene, is surprised to find Godfrey waiting tables there.
Although the script by Morrie Ryskind and Eric Hatch (adapted from the latter’s novella 1101 Park Avenue) pays tribute to the nobility of the less affluent members of New York society, it doesn’t reward them with much screen time. Apart from Mike (Pat Flaherty), the man Godfrey talks with at the start, Molly (Jean Dawson), the Bullocks’ straight-talking maid, is the only member of the lower orders given a voice. She combines a sharp tongue with a tender heart; she carries a torch for Godfrey but is bound to be disappointed because Irene does too. Molly’s employers may be variously awful but they’re awfully funny – at least, that’s the idea. There’s no doubting the cleverness and energy of My Man Godfrey. How much you enjoy it depends on how much you can take of its collection of moneyed brats and kooks and their hangers-on, and the playing of these roles.
Cornelia, who’s never forgiven Godfrey for what happened on their first encounter, plans to get him not just sacked but arrested for theft. She plants her priceless pearl necklace in his room. The police are called but there’s no sign of the pearls under the mattress where Cornelia left them. Her financier father, who realises what she’s up to and tells Cornelia she’ll have to find the uninsured pearls, announces to the family late in the film that he’s lost all his money and may go to prison when his dodgy dealings come to light. Godfrey intervenes to save the day: with money he raised from pawning the necklace he found in his bed, he sold short and used part of the profits to buy stock that Bullock had sold. He presents the latter with the stock in question and returns to Cornelia the missing pearls. Before taking his leave of the family, Godfrey gives a moralising speech – ‘I’ve been repaid in many ways. I learned patience from Mr Bullock. I found Mrs Bullock at all times, shall we say, amusing …’ Cornelia asks what he found in her and Godfrey replies:
‘A great deal. You taught me the fallacy of false pride. You taught me humility. … There have been other spoiled children in the world. I happened to be one of them myself. You’re a high-spirited girl. I can only hope you use those high spirits in a more constructive way.’
It’s fortunate that William Powell’s calm delivery undercuts the pomposity of this parting shot. Powell’s dexterous underplaying ensures that he is, throughout, a pleasure to watch and listen to. The eccentric exuberance of Carole Lombard is often amusing and refreshing – especially in the opening scene at the dump – though one or two of Irene’s ditsy routines outstay their welcome. Eugene Pallette is splendid as the woebegone, exasperated Bullock, especially when, facing the prospect of time inside, he looks on the bright side: ‘If I do end up in jail, it’ll be the first peace I’ve had in twenty years’. You know how he feels. Alice Brady’s accomplished turn as non-stop chatterbox Mrs Bullock takes a lot of doing but there are times when you wish she’d stop doing it. Cornelia is meant to annoy but Gail Patrick’s unvarying voice and mannerisms grate on the nerves independently of the character.
Mischa Auer is even more tiresome as Mrs Bullock’s parasitic protégé Carlo. He too is supposed to be tiresome but Auer’s zaniness is hard work (as it would be again a couple of years later in You Can’t Take It with You). The running joke of Carlo’s insatiable appetite doesn’t really have legs. Oscars for supporting players were initiated in 1937 and My Man Godfrey became the first film in history to receive nominations in all four acting categories[1], though it failed to win in any (or for direction or screenplay, for which it also received nods). That didn’t happen again until 2014 (when American Hustle drew a quadruple acting blank). In the meantime, there were plenty of repetitions of barmy choices on the part of Academy voters to follow their recognition of Mischa Auer’s performance rather than Eugene Pallette’s.
It comes as a pleasant surprise that the film’s ending comes close to regaining the edge of its beginning, even though Gregory La Cava has to wrap up both the romance and the satirical moral of the story at very high speed. Godfrey, with Tommy as his business partner, uses the remainder of the profits he made on Bullock’s stock to transform the dump into a fashionable night club – called The Dump – and create fifty jobs. Irene tracks him down there, arranges for them to be married on the spot and delivers the closing line: ‘Stand still, Godfrey – it’ll all be over in a minute’. This finale expresses rather well, even if inadvertently, how My Man Godfrey’s ambitions as a social satire have been constrained and confused by the requirements of romantic comedy and, perhaps, lack of nerve. But it’s a good, sharp joke that privileged Irene finally gets her heart’s desire without being too bothered whether her man Godfrey wants her in return.
3 January 2020
[1] Best Actor – William Powell; Best Actress – Carole Lombard; Best Supporting Actor – Mischa Auer; Best Supporting Actress – Alice Brady.
