Director Gregory LaCava’s enshrinement in the Hollywood comedy pantheon is mainly due to My Man Godfrey (1936), which is still considered one of the peak achievements of the period. I’m not as taken with that film as most folks, but it’s clear that LaCava was an original director with a strong personal sense of how a movie should look and feel. Fifth Avenue Girl was released three years after Godfrey, with Ginger Rogers as the lone star among a stable of RKO ensemble actors.
It’s superficially a satire of 1930s American political discourse, much as Godfrey was. For my taste, the tone of Godfrey was dark and weird, elevated into screwball comedy by an over-the-top performance by Carole Lombard and a dependably debonair one by William Powell. On the surface it appeared to be socially progressive, but its praise for the “forgotten man” turned out to be praise for the clever stock-market investor of the future. Fifth Avenue Girl follows in its footsteps. Ginger Rogers plays Mary Grey, a tough young dame who can’t find a job, is always close to being homeless, trusts no one, and is quick with the put-downs. By chance she meets the middle aged founder and director of Amalgamated Pumps (played by Walter Connolly in an unusual starring role), a big company on the brink of bankruptcy. The film begins with him in hard-nosed negotiations with union heads, who are strikingly unsympathetic compared with the company officials. Hardly a progressive depiction. We also learn that his son and heir to the company (played by Tim Holt) is a polo-playing wastrel, his daughter (Kathryn Gray) is a dizzy debutante, and his wife (Veree Teasdale) is having an affair in public view. All are contemptuous of Mr. Borden, and all have forgotten his birthday.
Borden is intended to be a sympathetic comic figure that Hollywood delivered often: the magnate with poor roots who is fundamentally good-hearted and respectful of poor people, but is surrounded by family and friends who exploit him, and who has lost his moral compass in the midst of his luxurious success. It promises to be a familiar kind of satire, though maybe sharper than most of its like — as evidenced in an early dialogue between Borden and his butler, played by Franklin Pangborn in one of his warmest and most nuanced role. You don’t get Capra’s butlers being so … direct. (Remember, Godfrey is a butler, too.)
In this loveless springtime Borden goes to the park to see the trees budding. He runs into Mary Grey on the verge of starvation, a gorgeous lumpen-proletarian girl with a sharp tongue, a fatalist with an indomitable will to live. Rogers’s character is a combo of Joan Blondell’s gold-diggers (without the cheer) and Jean Arthur’s waifs (without the intensity). And that remains a problem throughout the film — aside from a few fleeting moments, Rogers’s character isn’t really comic; she lacks cheer and intensity, two of the most important attributes of a screwball heroine. Borden decides that Mary has restored his love of life. He takes her to dinner at The Flamingo Club, a fancy restaurant, where Mary gets a taste of the high life, but also of the inherent corruption of the upper ten thousand, and busts the chops of a Wall Street-type who badmouths “the government.” (Here’s one of the odd problems of historical context — the film often feels like it was made in the early ’30s, not 1939.)
Quickly, Borden takes Mary on as his companion. Even though there’s no hint of hanky-panky, the film unambiguously places Mary in the position of a mistress, and she’s quite willing. She didn’t start out as a gold-digger, but the gold is being shoveled at her. As in Godfrey, most of the drama unfolds in the Borden nuclear family. Now, nobody’s acting is especially interesting in the film; Rogers is sullen most of the time, and her witty remarks tend to be almost painfully caustic. There’s one exception, Verree Teasdale as Mrs. Borden. Just as Alice Brady and Gail Patrick basically steal the show in Godfrey, so does Teasdale as the ridiculously vain wife who considers her daughter’s remark that she’s “old enough to be my mother” an insult.
The family-romance plot is wound down disappointingly: Mr. and Mrs. Borden are reconciled when the vain shrew becomes a loving wife, and Ginger is betrothed to young Tim, a romance that only the formula can justify. What about the political economy? Even though capitalism is explicitly taken to task for the miseries of millions of American workers, the only explicit alternatives are even less sympathetic. The union leaders don’t care if the company goes bankrupt; they want what they want (and notably there are two unions in the negotiations, and they’re in competition). Young Tim applies himself to save the company by making cheaper pumps. The funniest political scene is also Rogers’s best in the film. Driven to distraction by the resentful pontifications of the household’s young Communist chauffeur, she literally attacks him for talking without acting. Mary is too lumpen to share a political position, but she has some basic loyalty to her people when she slaps said chauffeur for calling her an enemy to her class. But in the end, the only position that makes sense is the cook’s: work hard and save your money. (The film has apparently forgotten that the cook’s $2000 would have been taken from her when the capitalist banks went bust in 1932.)
Fifth Avenue Girl is lovely to look at, even if it fails to make any points. The set of the Borden abode outdoes most movie mansions — except maybe the palaces in Lubitsch films and Xanadu. Speaking of Xanadu, LaCava began his career as a cartoonist for a Hearst newspaper, and remained within the Hearst orbit as a director, working closely with Cosmopolitan Films, Hearst’s personal wing of MGM. LaCava also directed the extraordinarily strange Gabriel Over the White House in 1933 — a film some view as a satire of American proto-fascism, and others as sincere propaganda for American fascism, and which Hearst had a hand in writing. Gabriel has been treated as an outlier in LaCava’s career, but now I wonder whether we should look at it as more central to LaCava’s vision.