The Good Fairy is one of the great film comedies of the period. And an anomaly. It’s perfect on its own terms – hilarious, warm, with fantastically good performances. It stars Margaret Sullavan at her most luminous in her best comic role. It was directed by William Wyler, who did not direct a lot of comedies. Known for his stubborn precision, Wyler’s style wasn’t the most congenial for comedy. But the script! The screenplay is by Preston Sturges, one of his first. The whole film is so recognizably in Sturges’s later style that it would be easy to convince me that he was the real director. And if that weren’t enough, the script is an adaptation of a play by Ferenc Molnár, the Hungarian comic playwright who was a demigod both in Europe and in Hollywood. In the end, that’s neither here nor there, since there’s very little of the original, singularly brittle play in Wyler’s and Sturges’s recreation.
The Good Fairy fits in a comic subgenre that was particularly popular with the European writers associated with Lubitsch, the comic fairy tale – films like Midnight, Ball of Fire, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (all three, as it happens, had Brackett-Wilder scripts). A lot of the charm of these stories comes from the way the fairy tale becomes ironic, but never in a sarcastic way. Comedy has its own magic – it’s never bitter. But over and above its comic magic, The Good Fairy has an extra one – for me personally, and, you could say, ethnically. For some reason, the film makers decided to keep the setting as Hungarian as possible. The street signs and marquees are in Hungarian, the street sets and window views clearly imitate Budapest vistas. And the Hungarian has its own magic. The movie theater where Luisa has her first job as an usherette is called Álmodó Palota, which can mean both a palace that’s dreaming and a palace where one goes to dream. Now, Lubitsch also had a lot of authentic-looking Hungarian signage in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which was also based on a Hungarian boulevard comedy. Lubitsch loved what came to be termed in Hollywood “Hungarian plays,” and they had a lot of influence on Wilder, too. But there aren’t any similar connections evident with The Good Fairy. Sturges had no Mitteleuropäische associations and Wyler’s parents were Alsatian Jews, far from Budapest. So what made them stick so close to the Hungarian original? Who actually chose the play at Universal?
Even if you’re not Hungarian, The Good Fairy is a masterpiece. I think of it as Preston Sturges’s first true Sturges film.
I wanted to include a clip of one of the many marvelous scenes, this one early in the film as the orphan Luisa (Sullavan) begins her first job outside the orphanage, as an usherette in the Álmodó Palota movie house. In the scene, Luisa has joined a crew of usherettes dressed in carnival military uniforms. Her job is to direct patrons to one side or the other for their seats, with the help of a glowing arrow. One patron, known only as “The Waiter” (the great Reginald Owen), somewhat tipsily refuses to follow her directions (he’s been following directions all day at his restaurant and demands freedom once he’s off work). Confused at first, Luisa solves the problem by ultimately re-directing her arrow toward the side where he originally wanted to go. As she directs some patrons to their seats, the innocent Luisa becomes entranced by the movie being shown, her first. The Waiter invites her to sit down and watch, and together they are moved to tears by an intense break-up scene, in which a cold, aristocratic male orders his elegant, distraught female lover to leave his apartment. Meanwhile, in a quintessential Sturges joke, the other patrons either leave the theater in boredom themselves or fall asleep.
There is a good print of the film included in Kino’s William Wyler collection. My stills, however, come from an earlier, unrestored print.
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