So here’s an example of how my taste differs from most people’s. Four’s a Crowd does not get much love, neither from film historians nor from audiences, despite the fact that it was directed by Michael Curtiz, and starred Errol Flynn, Rosalind Russell, and Olivia de Havilland. The consensus seems to be that it’s somewhat leaden, its pacing isn’t right, its story is too complicated, and that that shouldn’t be a big surprise since Curtiz wasn’t a very humorous fellow and had no natural gift for comedy, and the studio, MGM, was comically challenged as an institution. Among the many problems of actually making the film was that none of the actors (with the possible exception of Flynn) liked making it. The script was basically a ripoff of Libeled Lady, which had been a success two years earlier. That might have been expected, since both scripts were based on story ideas by the same writer, Wallace Sullivan.
Well, I saw a different film. I really like Four’s a Crowd. A lot. It’s a daffy comedy, but a special kind of daffy: slick daffy. It appears on the surface to be a mile-a-minute dialogue comedy in the American crazy talk mode. Flynn plays Bob Lanford, a “public relationships” expert, whose specialty is what we’d call Reputation Repair. He creates press campaigns to save bad reps by persuading his clients to donate lots of money to charities. (Apparently all this is based on the rehabilitation of John D. Rockefeller from arch-villain to great philanthropist through public relations campaigns.) The “hitch” (the term Bob uses whenever his careening plans encounter complications) is that he often has to make the reputation worse before he makes it better. Jean Christy (played by Russell) is a reporter in the Hildy Johnson vein (her iconic role in His Girl Friday is two years in the future), whose newspaper is about to be closed down. Jean persuades Bob to take on the task of saving the paper — of which he was once the general manager — as a personal challenge, using the paper as the vehicle first for slamming, and then rehabilitating, the reputation of a local magnate, thus increasing circulation and saving the paper. Bob proceeds to turn the curmodgeonly and conscience-free John P. Dillingwell (a name Preston Sturges would have been proud of) (played by Walter Connolly) into the most hated man in the country. Problem is, Dillingwell doesn’t care; but then he does. The complications of the plot proliferate dizzyingly: Dillingwell’s goofy grand-daughter Lorri (de Havilland) is engaged to the current managing editor of Jean’s paper (i.e., the one who wants to shut the paper down), Patterson Buckley (Patric Knowles). So there’s that complication: Bob’s plan requires Lorri’s fiancé to trash the reputation of his millionaire future grandfather-in-law. But then a new hitch in Bob’s plan requires him to court Lorri and propose to her. She accepts, but… I’ve barely scratched the surface here. There are electric train races, two different sets of canine antagonists, an amazing caper to steal butter from the Dillingwell kitchen, cross-cut romances that end up with a last-minute double wedding of Jean and Bob on one side and Lorri and Patterson on the other.
There’s no question that the plot is tangled and a lot of it doesn’t make sense. But it’s not supposed to. The resemblances to the extraordinary Libeled Lady are superficial. That film is character-driven. What makes Four’s a Crowd a dopamine gas is the sheer acceleration of complications, not only or even mainly on the plot level, but in the addition of detail upon comic detail in almost every scene. There’s no question that Sturges would have made a better film from the material, but I think he had to secretly admire what Curtiz did with it.
Flynn is fine as a screwball hero; he talks as fast as Cary Grant. Russell is of course one of the fastest talking dames in the genre, though her role isn’t as prominent as one would expect. It’s de Havilland that steals the show for me. It’s said that she hated making the movie, but you’d never be able to tell. She’s very funny and a striking comedienne. Many critics of the film have bad things to say about Knowles, that he’s wooden — but I just don’t see that. His role as Patterson is small, but he’s very funny, too, as the rich young suitor who’s always five steps behind Flynn. Connolly is, as always, brilliant. But the most impressive figure in all this is Curtiz. He directed few comedies, and I haven’t found anyone to praise his chops as a comic director. But Four’s a Crowd is a tour-de-force in my opinion of combining and piling on comedy at every level: structural, verbal, situational, parodistic, all the way to the behavior of dogs and inanimate objects. The film pretends to be a screwball comedy of manners, but it’s basically slapstick in elegant costumes.
Late in the game Bob reveals to Jean that his hustle is really inspired by the desire to get the rich to give to charity. We haven’t had much sign of it until then — but there’s a fine scene when Bob gets some resistance from his barber.
We’re not sure whether we’re headed to Capra or Hawks territory until Bob, hyperconfident in his ability to persuade even the amoral millionaire, encounters his first obstacle: the dogs. Big ones.
The notion that Curtiz wasn’t good at comedy makes no sense to me. Four’s a Crowd is an example of the kind of comedy that has to be mapped out in crazy detail before shooting can begin because the movements of the actors negotiating the different kinds of space (and there are lots of them) has to be timed perfectly. This is true of many of the MGM comedies. (And it’s silly to say that MGM didn’t make good comedies at the time: what about Libeled Lady or The Thin Man?) There are lots of wonderful micro-moments of complex timing. Watch the editing of this scene with de Havilland coursing through spaces to reach Patterson’s office. It’s as good an example as any of how the camera and editing can have a sense of humor (not to mention de Havilland’s great comic striding).
For me, the centerpiece of the film, worth the price of admission alone, is an extended sequence in which Bob skulks through the Dillingwell mansion to steal some butter. (He plans to apply it to the tracks in a toy-train race to which he has challenged the miniature railroad enthusiast, Dillingwell. Daffy enough? Get the Rockefeller dig?) It’s almost ten minutes long — and I’m so grateful that the MGM copyright people haven’t blocked it from youtube. I won’t describe it. It’s worth watching to see how many comic elements Curtiz puts in motion and at what pace. Buster Keaton’s spirit is alive in it. Just imagine how much care it took to map all that out. (And it’s even funnier in context.)
Curtiz may not have had a lot of experience making comedies, but he could always draw on a marvelous sense of parody. In the midst of this scary caper — our hero eluding the guards after pilfering sticks of butter — we get beautiful noir photography.
We’re used to the way wit works both in screwball and high-mannered comedy — words move from level to level, figure to figure. Curtiz does something similar with physical levels. There’s a fine scene early in the film when Bob and Jean enter a grand elegant Hollywood nightclub to meet Lorri and to muscle in on Patterson, who was once friends with Bob but detests him now because he has a history of stealing his amours. It’s a great white space familiar from so many Hollywood comedies, but this one is a bit different. It has seats with obstructed view. Very obstructed.
Then there’s the toy-train race, which we see from the most dramatic vantage possible:
Or take this spatialization of Bob’s most pressing problem: he’s engaged to Lorri and courting Jean.
Finally, I may have special affection for this film because it’s a great example of “phallus, phallus, who’s got the phallus?” The node of power keeps shifting from character to character, and from characters to animals and objects, and a big part of the comedy is that Flynn is our focal character. As the great screen swashbuckler he is rarely phallically challenged. But here the phallus keeps jumping away from him. In that sense Four’s a Crowd has more in common with Bringing Up Baby than Libeled Lady. I think Hawks, too, must have liked that butter-caper scene.