Gregory La Cava was an ingenious, supremely gifted director of comedies. He was universally respected and admired, but like his peer Leo McCarey, he has never been accorded auteur status because he didn’t have the power (and probably the desire) to write his own screenplays like Preston Sturges, or to choose scripts that could be molded into a directorial vision like Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks. He was a brilliant, dependable contract director, who could transform his assignments into original gems by basically changing anything in the original story in any way he wished. He was never kept on a leash, because his producers knew he would deliver copy on time, and it would be good copy. (It helped that he was an associate of William Randolph Hearst and headed Hearst’s animation studio at the beginning of his career.) I have a soft spot for La Cava because several of his comedies are among the best ever made in that golden age of talkie comedies — The Half-Naked Truth, Bed of Roses, The Affairs of Cellini, My Man Godfrey, and Stage Door.
But he was a corporate man, and not every sow’s ear makes it to a silk purse. He made his share of uninspired clunkers. One of the most egregious for my taste is She Married Her Boss. Here’s a cruel but not inaccurate summary of the plot. Julia Scott (Claudette Colbert), invaluable executive secretary to top department store owner-executive Richard Barclay (Melvyn Douglas), has a deep yen for said boss. But Boss, having had bad experiences with a former wife, is anti-marriage, and basically anti-romance. Barclay depends on Julia because she’s the real captain of his company ship, but he’s also impressed by the way she can manage his messed-up little family — a vapors-prone sister (Katharine Alexander) and a ridiculous back-talking brat of a daughter (Edith Fellows). Barclay proposes marriage to Julia, who’s in love with him, and she accepts — but he has no real interest in her as a woman, he just wants the dual perks of a managerial genius and someone who can deliver him from his daughter’s endless petty provocations. Julia really wants to be a housewife and mother (note that the Barclay “house” is one of those gothic mansions that La Cava was constantly presenting in his career, as if every movie household should somehow evoke Hearst’s monumental pile). Totally insensitive to Julia’s feminine charms (keep in mind it’s Claudette Colbert), Barclay desires only to secure Julia’s masterly services. Meanwhile, Julia’s friends want something better for her, and try to fix her up with a more respectful admirer, Lennie (Michael Bartlett).
In her frustration with Barclay, Julia entertains Lennie’s sincere advances, which leads to a striking scene — maybe the only one that the film is ever noted for — when the champagne-drunk duo play out a little psychodrama in the display window of the Barclay emporium, surrogating the showroom mannequins for Barclay’s dysfunctional nuclear family.
In the end, Barclay realizes in a drunken binge exactly where Julia is coming from, and joins in her trashing the very show window that Julia had, modernist style, displayed as simulations of the family that Richard suffers from, in, and because of. Celebrating their liberation from the Protestant work ethic, together they toss bricks into the show windows of capitalism. Vive La Revolution!
To cut to the chase, She Married her Boss is a pretty terrible comedy, and a pretty terrible story all tolled. There are lots of reasons for this (I won’t list them all, don’t worry). I wouldn’t have associated it with La Cava, if I didn’t know about My Man Godfrey and Fifth Avenue Girl and their strange pretzel politics, what might be called “Roosevelt Republicanism.” The film was made by Columbia Studios (one of the few La Cava made with them). Frank Capra was Columbia’s star director, and doubtless La Cava was influenced by his Popular Front Lite sensibilities. The script was by Sidney Buchman, one of most gifted comic screenwriters of the time — he was later to write Theodora Goes Wild, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Holiday, Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Talk of the Town. Buchman would join the Communist Party a few years later, remain on its rolls until 1945, and was blacklisted in ’53. As far as I can tell, She Married Her Boss was his only collaboration with La Cava. La Cava would soon connect with Morrie Ryskind, who would script My Man Godfrey, Fifth Avenue Girl, and Stage Door. Ryskind’s politics were the opposite of Buchman’s. Judging from She Married her Boss, though, it’s clear that La Cava’s ideological leanings trumped those of both writers. I’ve remarked on how both Godfrey and Fifth Avenue Girl appear to be progressive, but are far more sympathetic to business-class interests than Capra’s little-man populism. (Not to mention the Roosevelt-as-Mussolini politics of Gabriel Over the White House.) The only plausibly leftist element in the future Commie Buchman’s script for Boss is its respect for Julia as a professional. But whatever dignity she might possess in that regard is undermined by … everything else. She’s a better manager than Douglas’s Barclay, but she really wants to be a wife, a housewife at that, and a mother. Barclay’s great flaw is that he won’t let her be one. He insists that she stop all that domestic flouncing around and keep her eyes on her job. Some folks try to read the antipathetic depiction of Barclay as a critique of capitalist heartlessness, and Julia as a proto-feminist image of a super-competent woman who is able to have it all, if only the capitalist male establishment would let her have it. The scene of the two of them throwing bricks at the display window is supposedly a metaphor for liberation from commodity-fetishism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As with all of La Cava’s dalliances with class struggle, there are no structural or social dimensions. Everything is about personal relationships and family values. The Republican critique of business ethics at the time always came down to critiques of the rich behaving badly. The solution: more attention to family.
Ideological fuzz is not the main problem, though. Boss is a woeful, dreary, humorless, stifling, stagey mishmash. It’s inconceivable that a dame like Colbert could be attracted to Douglas’s Barclay. He’s no more charismatic than a petulant talking fence-post in a tailored suit. Instead of charisma, Melvyn Douglas oozes an interference field. There were lots of human Faraday Cages in Hollywood, actors in leading romantic roles who seemed like they were animatronic dummies, pretty men delighted with their faces, or clothes-horses with uncles in the business. Douglas isn’t just uncharismatic, however, he’s an uncharismatic jerk. As the romantic lead! The plot attributes even his transformation into a sympathetic lover to alcohol.
It’s also a stretch to imagine the urbane, feminine Colbert as a manager, the kind of role Rosalind Russell excelled at. Colbert was famous for using her own haute couture wardrobe in her films, and it’s a good bet her closets weren’t stuffed with managerial threads.
Things go to unintentionally satirical heights when Julia becomes one of the family, and changes to domestic attire. Try wearing this at home!
At his best, La Cava was a brilliant wild one. She Married her Boss, though, is as woeful as its title implies.