When Carole Lombard and the family maid discuss the newly hired
butler, we can read her mind when she says, “I’d like to sew his buttons
on sometime, when they come off.” In 1936, when elegant men’s formalwear
didn’t use zippers, audiences must have had an even better idea of what she was
thinking. The two women both have crushes on Godfrey (William Powell), a
homeless man who Lombard, competing in a scavenger hunt, discovers living at
the city dump. Lombard wins the hunt by producing Godfrey at a society ball and
then, during an argument with her bitchy sister and loony mother, hires him to
be the butler for her rich family. “Do you buttle?” she asks him, so
crisply and directly that she could mean anything, or everything. Her romantic
obsession is hopeless because Godfrey has transformed himself overnight from an
unshaven bum into a polished, sophisticated man who prides himself on his
proper behavior. When she grabs him and kisses him, he regards her with utter
astonishment.
“My
Man Godfrey,” one of the treasures of 1930s screwball comedy, doesn’t
merely use Lombard and Powell, it loves them. She plays Irene, a petulant kid
who wants what she wants when she wants it. His Godfrey employs an attentive
posture and a deep, precise voice that bespeaks an exact measurement of the
situation he finds himself in. These two actors, who were briefly married
(1931-33) before the film was made in 1936, embody personal style in a way that
is (to use a cliché that I mean sincerely) effortlessly magical. Consider
Powell, best known for the “Thin Man” movies. How can such reserve
suggest such depths of feeling? How can understatement and a cool, dry delivery
embody such passion? You can never, ever catch him trying to capture effects.
They come to him. And Lombard in this film has a dreamy, ditzy breathlessness
that shows her sweetly yearning after this man who fascinated her even when she
thought he really was a bum.
Like
Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” (1941), Gregory La Cava’s
“My Man Godfrey” contrasts the poverty of “forgotten men”
during the Depression with the spoiled lifestyles of the idle rich. The family
Irene brings Godfrey home to buttle for is the Bullocks, all obliviously nuts.
Her father, Alexander (that gravel-voiced character actor of genius, Eugene
Pallette), is a rich man, secretly broke, who addresses his spendthrift family
in tones of disbelief (“In prison, at least I’d find some peace”).
Her mother, Angelica (Alice Brady), pampers herself with unabashed luxury and
even maintains a “protégé” (Mischa Auer) whose duties involve
declaiming great literature, playing the piano, leaping about the room like a
gorilla and gobbling up second helpings at every meal. Her sister Cornelia
(Gail Patrick) is bitter because she not only lost the scavenger hunt but got
pushed into an ash heap after insulting Godfrey. And there is the maid, Molly
(Jean Dixon), who briefs Godfrey on the insane world he is entering. She loves
Godfrey, too, and perhaps down deep so does Cornelia, and so might the protégé,
if he didn’t like chicken legs more.
Godfrey
buttles flawlessly, bringing Alexander his martinis a tray at a time, whipping
up hors d’oeuvres in the kitchen and keeping his secret. He has one. Unmasked
by a Harvard classmate at a party, he turns out to be born rich but down on his
fortune after an unhappy romance. The Bullocks never figure out he’s too good
to be a butler (or a bum) because they’re all blinded by their own selfishness,
except for Irene, who dreams of his buttons. Under the surface, emotion is
churning. Godfrey, having come to like and admire his fellow hobos at the dump,
is offended that the Bullocks flaunt their wealth so uselessly, and that leads
to one of those outcomes so beloved in screwball comedy, so impossible in life.
God,
but this film is beautiful. The cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff is a shimmering
argument for everything I’ve ever tried to say in praise of black and white.
Look me in the eye and tell me you would prefer to see it in color. The
restored version on the Criterion DVD is particularly alluring in its surfaces.
Everything that can shine, glimmers: the marble floors, the silver, the
mirrors, the crystal, the satin sheen of the gowns. There is a tactile feel to
the furs and feathers of the women’s costumes, and the fabric patterns by
designer Louise Brymer use bold splashes and zigs and zags of blacks and whites
to arrest our attention. Every woman in this movie, in every scene, is wearing
something that other women at a party would kill for. These tones and textures
are set off with one of those 1930s apartments that isintendedto look like a movie set, all poised
for entrances and exits.
I
found myself freezing the frame and simply appreciating compositions. Notice a
shot when Godfrey exits screen right and the camera pans with him and then
pushes to poor, sad Irene, seen through sculptured openings in the staircase
and chewing the hem of her gown. Look for another composition balanced by a
light fixture high on the wall to the right. You’ll know the one.
A
couple of reviewers on the Web complain that the plot is implausible. What are
we going to do with these people? They’ve obviously never buttled a day in
their lives. What you have to observe and admire is how gently the film offers
its moments of genius. Irene has a mournful line something like, “Some
people do just as they like with other people’s lives, and it doesn’t seem to
make any difference … to some people.” Somehow she implies that the
first “some people” refers to theoretical people, and the second
refers to other people in the room.
Her
futile love for Godfrey shows itself in the scene where he’s doing the dishes
in the kitchen, and she says she wants help: “I want to wipe.” I
know, it sounds mundane in print, but the spin she puts on it brings buttons
back to our minds.
The
“implausibility” involves the complications of a theft of pearls,
some swift stock market moves, and Godfrey’s plans for the city dump. OK, it’s
all implausible. That’s what I’m here for. By pretending the implausible is
possible, screwball comedy acts like a tonic. Nothing is impossible if you cut
through the difficulties with an instrument like Powell’s knife-edged delivery.
He betrays little overt emotion, but what we glimpse is impatience with some
people who will not do the obvious and, indeed, the inevitable.
The
movie also benefits from the range of sharply defined characters, and the
actors to play them. Even the biggest stars in those days were surrounded by
other actors in substantial roles that provided them with counterpoint, with
context, with emotional tennis partners. Notice here the work of Eugene
Pallette, who bluntly speaks truth even though his family is deaf to him. By
God, he’s had enough: “What this family needs is discipline. I’ve been a
patient man, but when people start riding horses up the front steps and parking
them in the library, that’s going a little too far. This family’s got to settle
down!” His voice is like a chain saw, cutting through the vapors around
him.
This
movie, and the actors in it, and its style of production, and the system that
produced it, and the audiences that loved it, have all been replaced by pop
culture of brainless vulgarity. But the movie survives, and to watch it is to
be rescued from some people who don’t care that it makes a difference … to
some people.
“The Thin Man” is also reviewed in the Great Movies
collection.
