In his prime in the late ’20s and early ’30s, Gregory La Cava was an amazingly versatile and restless director of comedies. When he was assigned to direct The Affairs of Cellini by RKO he had made some of W.C. Fields’s best silents (and according to Fields, invented his lasting screen persona), as well as the brilliant code-ignoring Bed of Roses, and Lee Tracy’s highest words-per-minute romp, The Half-Naked Truth. Everything he had done was as American as snake oil, so the historical costume farce of Cellini came out of the blue. Not in his wheelhouse, one would think. As it happens, it’s one of his best, an ostensibly weightless dalliance comedy set among ersatz Medicis but in fact a hilarious fantasy send-up of historical swashbuckler epics. (Well, weightless except for Constance Bennett’s 22 costumes, which were reported to have weighed 1000 pounds all tolled, including one which is said to have weighed 44 pounds. For perspective, Bennett herself weighed only 100).
The film was an adaptation of Edwin Justus Mayer’s successful Broadway play, The Firebrand. (Meyer was later to write the screenplay for To Be or Not To Be.) The play relied on the status of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini as a default volume in any given Great Books series on the middlebrow bookshelves of the time. The play is a tepid comic adventure romance, whose characters speak the florid faux Renaissance lingo familiar from pseudo-Shakespearean Hollywood fixups. The uncredited film adaptation is now attributed to Frédérique De Grésac, a legendary figure in early Hollywood, openly lesbian, sporting Georges Sand habille and an Oscar Wilde wit. As was his wont, La Cava rewired the script. He was famous for, and proud of, his improvisational style of re-composing or outright re-inventing the plays assigned to him, but Cellini is unusually tight, following the strict discipline of bedroom farce. Meyer’s Cellini is a stereotypical Renaissance Italian romantic hero, equal parts macho brawler and troubadour lover. La Cava/Grésac turn him into pure parody, and as a result diminish him dramatically, too. Instead of being the constant focus of attention, he’s just an equal player in a foursome farce. The film’s brilliance lies in the way the dazzling, epic visuals, bitingly sophisticated dialogue, and broad self-parody mingle seamlessly. Historical costume comedies were, according to film historians, unpopular in the late 20s and early 30s. I think the mood became more open to them because of the success of one particular film, and not an American one at that, Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, released in 1933. It mixed so much comedy into the drama (and won so many awards) that the Hollywood studios saw the gold. And of course, history has little to do with any of it, especially with Cellini. What we see might as well be a VR installation on the Enterprise‘s holodeck. It’s as Ruritanian as Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow, made the following year, to which it has striking resemblances.
La Cava was for many years a cartoonist and producer for Hearst’s animation studio, International Film Service, and Cellini has the most cartoonish aura of all his comedies, a salacious Max Fleischer-meets-Tex Avery romp in antique costumes. Frank Morgan plays Alessandro, Duke of Florence. This was the role that slotted Morgan forever as the perpetually flustered dithering fool. Although in a few roles he’s still effective — in The Good Fairy and The Shop Around the Corner, for example –, I usually find his bumbling type irritating. In Cellini, La Cava places him front and center, a bona fide opera buffa prince, and he was fresh enough to snag an Oscar nomination for it. Constance Bennett is his equally lustful, but considerably less bumbling, Duchess. The opening scene displays some of La Cava’s distinctive gifts: making a stagey, physically static scene cinematic through fine framing, lighting, and shot-pacing. It certainly helped that the great cinematographer Charles Rosher was behind the camera. Cellini is visually dazzling from beginning to end. (This is another film that really must be restored. The print isn’t as disappointing as Bed of Roses — another La Cava-Rosher beauty, from the previous year — but the blur hurts Cellini more.)
The brawling goldsmith Cellini is played by Fredric March. I don’t care much for March in general, but the choice to have him play a swashbuckling lady-killer is very funny. Where Fairbanks or Erroll Flynn always treat their dangerous adventures and dalliances with gaiety, March’s Cellini is humorless, pinched, and totally without charisma. He’s so passive that he brings to mind Fellini’s explanation for why he chose Donald Sutherland to play Casanova: “his face is so pathetic.” (Fellini went further; Sutherland “has the eyes of a masturbator.”) And that’s the point.
One sweet surprise is that much of the humor comes from Fay Wray, who plays Cellini’s airhead model, Angela. Forget the idiotic squirming human worm of King Kong, she’s a deadpan hoot in Cellini. Innocent to the point of stupidity, she keeps foiling the clever plans of the great seducer by being so sublimely dense. As so often in classical French-style foursome farces, the men are basically fools, and the women control events. Angela is borderline stupid, but the cartoon wolves don’t care — they’re willing to pay, in the end. I love how she keeps looking out and trying to see what the mooncalf swashbuckler is (not) looking at.
The blustering Duke arrives at Cellini’s workshop to arrest him for incorrigible brawling, seductions, and humiliating his betters. He is to be hanged. The Duke’s fuddled heart isn’t really into it, though, and his plans change when he hears that the golden plates Cellini had been commissioned to deliver to the court aren’t finished. Even better, he espies the beautiful Angela. Randy but phallically challenged, the Duke decides he will bring Angela to the court to become a “court lady,” forgetting about Cellini altogether. He’ll have her brought to the court right away, since the Duchess is scheduled to be away at the Winter Palace that night.
Ah, yes. But the Duchess has plans of her own. She performs her own unexpected arrival at Cellini’s workshop to commission a copy of a gold key to her rooms, to be delivered that night at nine. Bennett basically plays the dominatrix to March’s servile sub. There’s lots of fun in The Affairs of Cellini, but the idea of a servile and deadpan swashbuckler is fun on another level. (Note how expansive the set has become — The Duchess even comments on it. She likes the bigger room to move around in and royal over.)
As the Duke treats Angela to a seductive repast of peacock tongues in the palace, asking her to call him by his nickname “Bumpy” and clumsily making his play, the gorgeous blonde Duchess (who at this point has far more phallic jam than either the Duke or Cellini, by an order of magnitude) announces to her Duke (she’s unaware that he’s scheduled a tryst with Angela) that she’s not going to the Winter Palace, after all (he’s unaware that she’s scheduled a tryst with Cellini). Oh, shit! The stage is set for classic farce’s game-with-rooms in an enormous palace. The guilty henpecked Duke has to improvise in the classic way, hustling the clueless Angela out of the (gigantic) room to a moonlit palace verandah right out of Lubitsch. Amazing comic dialogue here, too, so effortless that the audiences can miss how funny it is. That’s applicable to most of Cellini.
Meanwhile, the parallel seduction. Another great cartoon scene. Bennett plays the Countess like she’s a DeMille Lucrezia Borgia, but sexier. (Bennett’s Duchess is far more Borgia than Medici, and it was probably La Cava’s idea to turn the Duchess into a comic femme fatale.) Comparing the two couples in these adjacent scenes is a hoot. The Duchess is The Duke inverted; so, in a way, is the supposedly macho Cellini to the supposedly Venuslike Angela. I think Bennett was that age’s megastar as the comic seductress, the infinitely refined reshaping of Mae West, and in Cellini she pulls out all the stops. Anyway, bedroom farce’s required double-scene makes itself known, and the Countess is forced to hustle Cellini out of her (gigantic) bedroom to the same verandah where Angela had been exiled earlier. Angela’s bored and doing needlework. Cellini discovers her there and is dumbfounded. What luck! What a situation! The whole action design is hoary, but La Cava makes it totally fresh for me. La Cava mixes some As You Like It pixillation with Restoration comedy, and even some Dangerous Liaisons. The reverb in Cellini is a big hall.
I’ve mentioned before that I think La Cava likes to make fun of the Lubitsch Touch, and in a very loving way. There’s a lot one can glean about Lubitsch by comparing him with La Cava. Here’s one possibility. Cellini is very street smart, and Hollywood smart, but it’s also, shall we say, Rossini-smart. It’s easy to imagine the whole thing as a comic Rossini opera, even though music isn’t very prominent in it (not like, say, Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise). To me, La Cava stages a fine comic opera of its golden age. What was sonic in those plays is visual in La Cava. A lot of the setup was in the original play — solidly Middle European fantasy — but Cellini is having more fun that just that. Take this for an example. Cellini has swept Angela off the balcony to take her to an idyllic pastoral shelter (complete with goat), leaving the bereft Duke and Duchess searching the (gigantic) verandah for their respective objects of seduction. Of course, they bump into each other. Of course, they try to finesse their way out of an awkward — and disappointed — situation. The scene concludes with their parting before their respective bedroom doors.
Try this one on.
In design terms, these shots are, well… not dissimilar. I’m sure this is a fairly traditional shot in romantic farce. Lubitsch’s elegant frame (not to mention the high-modernist elegance of the humans, and that horrifically sophisticated clock between them) is a famous shot. The Cellini shot is probably totally under the radar. It’s a perfectly logical, unimaginative solution to a cynical parting scene in an gigantic room. But how did we get into such a gigantic space, anyway? The similarities may be completely fortuitous, just a natural part of the Hollywood style toolbox. But La Cava’s homage/parody of Trouble in Paradise in Bed of Roses is so obvious, I tend to feel that La Cava was often mocking Lubitsch, tacitly, the way a gifted and independent, admiring disciple might mock a favorite sensei. Putting the two films next to each other — Trouble and Cellini — one can see how much comic opera there is in Trouble. And for me, that makes it a better film than I previously thought it was.
The whole scene is a hoot.
Cellini takes Angela to his “mountain hideaway,” his supposedly idyllic paradise far from the seductions of court and the burdens of reality. This is March’s best scene. He’s the passionate pastoralist, extolling the beauties of nature while surrounded by a chorus of sheep and goats who offer constant raspberries as commentaries on his rhapsodies. Angela is hungry, the animals stink, and there’s a hole in the roof. The scene plays out like a happily parodistic mix of As You Like It and Much Ado (which are already pretty parodistic), with Cellini as a romantic Benedict. In some ways, this is a pretty remarkable scene. Hollywood had not made many films of Shakespeare’s comedies by this point. (In fact, the comedies were rarely performed even on stage in the ’20s and ’30s.) Max Reinhardt’s ground-breaking Midsummer Night’s Dream was a year in the future; Cukor’s Romeo and Juliet was another two years away, as was Olivier’s As You Like It. (As far as I can determine, the only true Shakespeare comedy made in Hollywood by 1934 was Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s Taming of the Shrew in 1929.) It’s obvious that March was basing his Cellini on Shakespearean comic heroes, and he’s very funny being one of them. Fay Wray plays her Angela like a Valley Girl. The tableau is as old as the hills, but La Cava’s technique is beautifully cinematic.
Disgusted with Angela’s prosaic whining, Cellini returns to Florence and The Duchess. Signor Pathetic Cellini tries to woo her by reading Petrarchan poetry, a seduction technique we know from the first scene tends to work with lesser women. But The Duchess/Constance Bennett/Dominatrix has no use for such masturbatory (as Fellini might say) dalliances. She’s a killer, she is. I just love this scene. Still a DeMille Lucrezia, she slithers through the scene. Poor ersatz swashbuckler Cellini is wrong-footed from the start. She asks him to bring her an urn which he no doubt made for her. It’s intended for rose petals, but The Duchess informs him it now contains the heart of one of her favorite former lovers. This is Boccaccio territory, and a big surprise for Cellini. Suddenly, guards arrive to arrest him, and The Duchess spirits him out of her room — again. The great macho-man is clueless. Asks The Duchess what should be done. Is left holding the urn. Hilarious.
Inevitably, the plot returns to the story’s primal scene, now distilled to its essence: Cellini is to be hanged, The Duchess saves him with subterfuge, and The Duke changes his mind at the last minute — now not because of Angela’s charms, but the threat of a revolution that The Duchess invents on the spot. La Cava’s versatility is truly impressive. Cellini is as compressed as The Half-Naked Truth is wild and woolly. Farce’s characteristic obsessive, increasingly compressed repetition is in full play. What took two long scenes to set up at the beginning is now narrowed into one — with an appropriate ratcheting up of the peril. Everybody’s chickens have come home to roost. I love the near-Lubitschean inverted-parallel jokes — The Countess’ blase “I don’t mind being hanged if you don’t” vs. The Count’s riposte to his general, Ottaviano: “I’d be brave too if it was your neck they wanted.”
The conclusions of romantic comedies always depend on the threading together of cross-purposes at the last moment, the interfusion of manipulation, misunderstanding, and coincidence. And lo! Cellini tries to escape The Count’s ill will by hooking him back up with Angela, who he claims is pining away for him in the mountain cabin. Backfire! The Duke wants Cellini to bring Angela to that night’s palace reception, which means that Cellini will have to face a jealous Duchess again, The Duke will claim that Angela is with Cellini, and everybody’s various evasions and deceptions threaten to go pffft. And everybody keeps digging everybody’s holes deeper.
Believing herself to be publicly scorned, The Countess plans her Lucreziesque revenge at a banquet that Max Fleischer would have been proud of.
A Jacobean Max Fleischer, that is. And all’s well that ends well, with the Decency League probably gnashing its collective teeth as The Duchess heads off to the Winter Palace with her dashing sub Cellini, Bumpy the Duke remains with Angela, and The Duchess retains her full phallic jam as the true Duke, after all.
If The Affairs of Cellini isn’t a neglected comic gem, nothing is.
Bonus:
There aren’t many available examples of La Cava’s actual cartooning. Here’s what youtube has to offer.
.
