Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey has a beautiful reputation. It’s viewed as La Cava’s signature film, with legendary performances by Carole Lombard and William Powell. Many of its fans consider it among the best screwball/romantic comedies ever made. It was surely the most highly regarded comedy of its time in Hollywood itself — it was nominated for Oscars for best director, best screenplay (Murray Ryskind), best actor (Powell), best actress (Lombard), best supporting actor (Mischa Auer), and best supporting actress (Alice Brady). (It didn’t win any of them, fwiw.) The script (by Morrey Ryskind and constantly tweaked and punched up by LaCava himself) is sophisticated, witty, and elegant. Its sets and costumes represent the state of the Hollywood art of the time. (There’s a fine entry about the costumes on Kimberley Truhler’s GlamAmor blog.) It was filmed by Ted Tetzlaff, Lombard’s go-to cameraman and one of the giants of the rich lighting and camera techniques of the period. Each scene is masterfully composed. It’s also often discussed as a politically acute comedy, equal to Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which was released the same year. Many consider it superior to Capra’s film for its lack of sentimentality. It’s a great film but I’m not totally enamored of it. I don’t think it’s a screwball comedy at all, its politics are suspect, and compared to the great freewheeling comedies of the time, it strikes me as static and confining.
Godfrey‘s reputation has made it difficult to appreciate on its own terms. There’s hardly a mention of it that doesn’t classify it as a screwball comedy — the Criterion commentary calls it “the quintessential screwball comedy” and there’s good evidence that it was the first film to which the term screwball was actually applied. I don’t think it fits in the screwball class at all — but I get why many people think it does. Some of its characters are daffy and talk fast and crazy, especially Lombard’s Irene Bullock. But that’s about it. That may be enough, but it’s like saying that what makes a noir film is Venetian blinds. There’s very little of the freedom characteristic of screwball comedy in it. Politically, too, I think it’s often misconstrued as a reconciliation-of-the-classes comedy expressive of Depression-era populism. It’s not that. It expresses a conservative melioristic reaction to FDR’s New Deal and trade union politics that has Hooverian roots. Like Godfrey pretending to be a butler but saving his immediate social world through clever Wall Street investments, it is an elegant, privileged impostor. It pretends to feel solidarity with “the forgotten man,” but it’s really for the bankers and the “job providers.”
The framework is as old as farce itself, combining a fractured fairy tale with the old shoe of the clever servant who outwits his masters. Like many Hollywood comedies of the era, the fairy-folktale structure is up front in Godfrey. Two competing sisters: one blonde, luminous, innocent, and kind-hearted, the other a dark Gothic Maleficent. Add a weak king, their father Alexander Bullock (Eugene Pallette), the family patriarch whose domain is so deep in debt it’s on the brink of ruin. Enter the butler Godfrey like an angel, who saves each member of the family from their particular vice, and provides livelihoods for honest social outcasts on the side. The clever servant, who is always an impostor of one kind or another, is actually a prince of sorts in Godfrey. He restores the little king to his rightful wealth, his own as well, and marries the good princess.
That structure is fine for romantic comedy, but it’s a stretch for screwball. There are almost as many definitions of what makes comedy screwball as there are critics and film scholars. Personally, I don’t think zany characters are enough. For me, screwball comedies almost always involve romantic contests between equally fast-talking, witty, and abnormally imaginative partners. One of them is drawn toward a world of conventional work, while the other naturally defies convention — and labor. In comic terms, one of them is (or wants to be) a creature of habit and routine, while the other wants to be free. In the end, there’s compromise and marriage (or the promise of it), but the spectacle of freedom is so strong that spontaneity, wise nonsense, and creative thinking become more cherished than in almost any other genre. In screwball, gender is relatively fluid and equalized — both male and female characters may be free or conventional, depending on the story. What matters to the Comic Spirit is that language and ideas should have free rein. Call it Screwball Ontology — the world itself creates the conditions for wit and play.
Screwball comedies are about liberation. The romantic leads may be recontained by marriage (or remarriage in The Awful Truth and The Lady Eve) at the end, but it’s never a conventional marriage. The romances are based on play, which they oppose to the work ethic (unless the work is itself liberatingly playful, like the newsroom-work of His Girl Friday). And maybe most important, its female protagonists are free from the stifling conventions of traditional women’s roles in patriarchy — free to have contrary opinions, to play practical jokes, to disguise themselves, to happily humiliate men, and to satirize Victorian morality.
That’s not how My Man Godfrey works. Godfrey is disciplinary. Somewhat like Pasolini’s Teorema in reverse, Godfrey introduces a stranger into a bourgeois family to show his effect on each member of it. Where Pasolini has the stranger unleashing each character’s libido, La Cava’s Godfrey does the opposite, he disciplines them. He saves the family patriarch Alexander Bullock (Eugene Palette) from financial ruin by wisely, generously, and modestly investing his money. He saves Mrs. Bullock from terminal irresponsibility by inspiring her husband to assert his proper masculine authority. He saves Cornelia from her false pride, cruelty, and dishonesty by shaming her with the truth about herself. He saves Irene by giving her a purpose — namely, to marry Godfrey. And he saves himself from his life of servile submission by cleverly hitting it big on the stock market and establishing a nightclub on the site of the East River dump, where he incidentally saves his down-and-out friends by providing them with jobs at his club, “The Dump.” The happy-ending isn’t a liberating compromise of playful partners, it’s a restoration of moral order. Godfrey is much closer to patrician comedies like The Philadelphia Story, in which shame and discipline are much more powerful forces than liberating play.
All this is of a piece with its politics. Godfrey is a parable of the conservative utopian solution to the Depression. Bullock is the business class awash in debt — overleveraged and inattentive to society. His family are wealthy parasites who produce nothing, take their privileges for granted, and don’t acknowledge the worth of the workers. (The film hardly depicts the “working masses”; the only fellow-bum that Godfrey identifies is a banker who went bust.) They waste his money on useless European “protégés,” take pleasure in humiliating the “less fortunate,” or aspire to become babbling know-nothing airheads, but they are rescued by Godfrey’s model of discipline and care. For his part, Godfrey represents the humbled and enlightened entrepreneurial class that is able through its knowledge of capital markets to start again, to rescue the upper classes, and to save the dignity and manhood of the working class by providing them with paid work.
That was the vision of society held by the Hoover administration after the Crash, which persisted among conservative Republicans after the election of FDR. Hoover’s suggested solution to mass unemployment was to exhort businessmen not to fire their workers and for big bankers to help smaller local banks remain solvent. (Neither happened.) The rich were exhorted to show benevolence toward the working poor. They should respect their workers. Power should remain with the wealthy, but they should practice noblesse oblige. It was inadmissible to imagine that workers should have agency over the terms of their labor. Hoover’s predecessor, Calvin Coolidge, could say “the business of America is business,” and Godfrey can say “the only difference between a man and a derelict is a job.” This attitude manifestly failed during the Depression, and conservatives, fearful at the prospect of union organizing and socialism, blamed unemployment publicly on the blind selfishness of the established business class — in other words, their personal morality. Surely once they saw how honest working folk were suffering, the business leaders would change their ways and create the conditions for increasing workers’ investment in capitalism — by expanding the stock market to reach “the people.” (In other words, to increase their own wealth by persuading the people working for them to identify with the ownership class. Sound familiar?)
Many commentators on the film don’t seem to remember that Godfrey was actually unaffected by the Crash. He ends up in the dump because of an intended suicide attempt following a heartbreak. The integrity of the bums inspires him to remain with them. His rejection of his brahmin past comes from his personal scorn and pride, not from experiencing the failure of society and political economy. In other words, Godfrey’s ruin was a result of his personal weakness. He acquires moral strength by humbling himself temporarily as a servant to a class that he holds in contempt, but learns to care for. Godfrey is a temporary bum who becomes a temporary servant who never loses the instincts and skills of a rich, skillful investor. He embodies and teaches the ameliorists’ lesson: social-economic suffering will be healed by the rich learning to be more modest, respectful, and benevolent.
By focusing only on the Bullock family, La Cava reproduces the problem that his parable set out to solve. When economic and social problems are really personal ones, there’s no need to look outside personal and family morality. What’s left unsolved by Godfrey’s riches-to-rags-to-riches narrative is: what is he to do with his female comic counterpart, Irene? From a certain distance, My Man Godfrey looks like one of those comedies that solves class differences symbolically through a love affair between men and women of two classes. But Irene and Godfrey are essentially of the same class. Are we supposed to think that Irene can learn to be more disciplined and self-aware. Really? Lombard’s Irene is besotted with Godfrey, but she can’t see much beyond him, and there aren’t many signs that she can change without his help. Godfrey, representing the enlightened entrepreneurial class, has to carry everybody!
Congruent with that conservative political comic spirit, My Man Godfrey is a very disciplined film. It is smooth in everything, with none of the rough edges and slapstick interludes of the other canonical screwballs of the period like Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth. In fact, it feels ahead of its time in style, more like the well-made, subtly lit, and seamlessly plotted comedies of the late 30s and early 40, like Cukor’s Philadelphia Story and Holiday. That’s not necessarily a good thing. You’d be hard-pressed to detect the freewheeling aesthetic of earlier La Cava comedies like Bed of Roses, The Affairs of Cellini, and especially the marvelous The Half-Naked Truth and the W.C. Fields silent classic Running Wild, in My Man Godfrey. As it would happen, this relatively slick, stifled styling became typical of La Cava’s last works, showing up especially in 5th Avenue Girl, a variation of Godfrey that makes Godfrey feel like a carnival.
This political affection for control is in some ways like the conservative requirement that all romantic comedies end in marriage, fulfilling the patriarchal gender destinies of the partners. Screwball comedies for the most part avoid politics except to include them in the grand mix of things to make ridiculous. Earnest critics might consider that a fault, but by bracketing out political moralizing there’s more room for fantasy and comic business. To put it crudely, less tendentiousness means more freedom. (This was the dilemma in Sullivan’s Travels, which I’m not convinced Sturges resolved.) In My Man Godfrey enlightened discipline is so important that the film’s action does not move very much. The characters are usually confined to settled spaces, most of them interiors, and they sit a lot. Compared with great screwball classics like Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve (every Sturges film in fact), in which the characters’ freedom is embodied in the many diverse spaces that they rush through, Godfrey‘s characters are confined. They don’t get out much. (Significantly, very few of the characters have jobs — aside from the servants, Godfrey and the housemaid Mary, only the cops investigating the fake theft of Cornelia’s pearls work in the world.)
This was definitely not the way La Cava had made films in the past. (Case in point: the wonderful The Half-Naked Truth is dominated by a fast-talking and fast-moving carnival barker played by Lee Tracy, an actor who would have been refused entry to the Godfrey set.) We see a trace of the old La Cava in the early scavenger hunt scenes. It’s pure carnivalesque comic chaos.
Yet Powell’s Godfrey provides a stable point, both in his acting style and in his sarcastic virtue.
From this point on, that Godfreyan stability will dominate every aspect of the comedy. That may not be a bad thing. It’s definitely not a screwball thing. Comic chaos becomes associated with disorder that needs to be contained. Lombard’s magnetic ditziness is the only freedom allowed — and that only because Godfrey appreciates her and we’re pretty sure (though not certain) that he will be able to contain her and make her productive (even less certain), as he was able to gentrify the hooverville into an upscale night spot. By the end, the recognition-and-resolution is delivered like a courtly Molière ex machina.
For all that, My Man Godfrey is a great film in almost every cinematic respect. It’s very funny. But it should be understood a little bit better.