MGM’s 1941 version of Charley’s Aunt shouldn’t be a neglected gem. It was very popular when it was released. It made the studio a lot of money. The play on which it is based has been one of the most popular farces in modern history. Wikipedia tells me that it has been performed continuously all over the world since it was first staged in 1893. It has been a steady favorite for school and college pageants, especially in all-male schools. Five English-language films have been made of it since its first silent version in 1925. According to Wikipedia, there have been four German or Austrian film versions, as well as Danish, Egyptian (two, in fact, a silent in 1920, and one in 1960), a Spanish opera, a Soviet television version, a Marathi adaptation and an Urdu one, as well as over 500 performances in China. IMDB lists 17 movie and television versions. Charley’s Aunt is being performed somewhere in the world at any given time.
So why is 20th Century Fox’s 1941 iteration so rarely seen and discussed nowadays? Perhaps with so many film versions it might have been lost in the wash, especially given that the Brits released one just the year before. But that would discount what makes this the best-known of all the other versions combined: Jack Benny cast in the title role. Benny was probably the most popular radio personality in the US at the time. The reason appears to be frustratingly prosaic. According to TCM’s notes on the film, the contract the Fox studio producers made with the producers of the 1940 Broadway iteration of Brandon Thomas’s original play stipulated that nothing would be changed from the Broadway version. In fact, George Seaton’s script includes many changes. Fox was sued and an injunction was issued against release of the film. The injunction was dismissed but the case went to trial. The results of the trial — no doubt a settlement of some sort — was never reported, and some issues apparently remain unresolved. TCM has never obtained rights to show the film, and as far as I can tell it has never been shown on television. Fortunately, it’s available on youtube and DVD. (The TCM notes can be found here: https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/70656/charleys-aunt#notes.)
The play on its own is a model British farce. Two gentleman juveniles at Oxford love two debutantes. (Mothers are nowhere to be seen.) The blocking father-figures have opposite interests, both of them ridiculous. One is a stiff, old-school moralist; the other is an indebted hypocritical climber with iffy morals. The young men’s fortunes seem to brighten when one of them, Charley Wykeham, is informed that he will soon be visited by his exotic widowed aunt, Donna Lucia d’Alvadorez, whom he has never met, arriving from Brazil. The young men want to declare their love to their girls, but they will need a female chaperone, the perfect use for Donna Lucia. But she is delayed, and must be replaced on the spot. Her replacement: their clownish roommate Lord Fancourt Babberley, known as Babbs, in drag, disguised as Donna Lucia.
The film deviates from the original play in many ways, all of them good ones. Babbs (Jack Benny) is a doofus and a wastrel, but Benny plays him with great comic energy. The performance is a little disorienting at first. Everyone in the cast is good at pretending to be British except for Benny. His accent is unconvincing and his physical deportment is, let’s say, unrefined for an English lord. The audience can’t know in the first scenes whether Benny is going to be his familiar pinched persona or playing real character.
The studio’s choice to cast Benny in one of the best-known drag parts in the world was a move to Americanize the famous Brit farce, and also to give Benny, a radio megastar with a poor track record with movies, a proven vehicle. But Benny wasn’t the first choice. The part was originally conceived for Tyrone Power (I’m glad that didn’t happen), and then Bob Hope (better). The result is pure Hollywood: a sendup of the zany propriety of British farce spliced with American physical clowning. (I think Benny made only two good film comedies, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be is one, Charley’s Aunt is the other.) Americanizing a British upper-class farce isn’t hard. It depends on one thing only, an American actor so energetically vulgar and charismatic that the British supporting roles seem small and humorously mechanical. Hollywood in the late 30s and early 40s was in a Golden Age of stand-alone comedians getting star roles. Any number of them could have played Charley’s aunt in this American style. Casting Benny, who was so well-known and idiosyncratic, was a stroke of genius.
We’re introduced to him at a stuffy 1890 Oxford cricket match where, characteristic of his general bad luck, he inadvertently bats a ball straight onto the noggin of the venerable Professor Redcliffe. Then he compounds the problem by spilling tea on the professor during tea-break. George Seaton’s script wittily satirizes the original play, managing in short order to lampoon three sacred cows of stuffy upper-crust Brit films of the period: Oxford, cricket and tea-time, and Archie Mayo’s direction is all-in, too. There’s no question already at the outset that real Brits are not the target audience.
The script is built around Benny, who plays Babbs not as an effete idiot lordling but a wild man. He’s been at Oxford for ten years (which I guess is supposed to explain why the then 47 year old Benny passes for an undergraduate). Gentlemanly mannerisms aren’t part of Benny’s toolkit, but there’s a witty overlap between the original play and Benny’s trademark traits. The young spendthrift aristocrats are perpetually broke, and Benny’s persona was notoriously cheap. The funny circulation of coin to and from the college’s housekeeper, Brasset (Ernest Cossart), is in the play and also in Benny’s wheelhouse.
Meanwhile, Donna Lucia (Kay Francis) arrives, but wishes to observe her nephew’s amour from a distance, incognito.
When the boys get word that the real Donna is delayed, they commandeer Babbs to pretend to be her — a convenient choice, since Babbs is preparing to play an elderly matron in the college’s varsity play. He already has the costume for it. But not much in the way of enthusiasm. And thus begins Benny’s tour de force as Charley’s aunt.
Enter the two debs, Kitty (Arleen Wheelan) and Amy (a very young Deborah Kerr). They must not be seen unchaperoned in the boys’ rooms, so the false Donna Lucia is immediately put to work.
Charley’s Aunt is about drag. It’s the soul of the play, and even more so the film. (I wonder how the god-bothering evangelical fanatics will deal with it nowadays.) Drag was, of course, an inherent comic device for many varsity plays and revues in which the characters were played by boys and young men. Many silent slapstick stars — Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Stan Laurel — employed cross-dressing; Fatty Arbuckle specialized in it. The key to keeping it “gender-safe” was to stress the humor of an exaggeratedly masculine persona trying to act feminine, the more clueless the better, at least for broad farce. That was how Benny’s performance was publicized.
Usually, slapstick drag played on a double grotesquerie. On the one hand, the male actor was already sufficiently idiosyncratic physically that he did not seem typically masculine, so that masculinity was somehow protected from perilous boundary violations. On the other (and as a consequence), the women they were disguised to be were comically “unfeminine” — homely spinsters, harridans and old biddies. In a way, they had to be even less attractive as women than they were as “men.” The humor of the situation could cut two ways, lampooning both genders. Some great comic actors, however, crossed the invisible taboo line, taking evident delight in actually becoming feminine. For some, like Chaplin, it was easier than for others.
Mistaken gender identities depend on steep moments of confusion. A character compelled to play a cross-dressing role has to be convincing at least some of the time. A guy in drag at least has to try to pass. And so unfolds the many-sided comic situation of Jack Benny as both ugly and attractive, depending on which character’s eyes are doing the beholding.
The more comical, and steeper, situation is when the guy in drag realizes that he now has better means to get close to the girls, as long as they don’t get wise too quickly.
Lubitsch respected Benny as an actor, even though Benny himself wasn’t so sure. He thought of himself as mainly a comedian. A consequence of this complicated and ambivalent attitude is that Benny as the faux Donna Lucia is funny in a way that an actor without star baggage could not be. On one level, Benny plays his drag role as high vaudeville, constantly taking advantage of whatever license the situation offers. With Amy’s guardian, Mr. Spettigue (Edmund Gwen), he’s a censorious old harridan (who will later morph into a dominatrix). With Jack’s father, Sir Francis (Laird Cregar), who is interested only in Donna Lucia’s fortune, he’s a coquette. And with the debs, he’s the lech under the petticoats. What a role! Benny is terrific, a slapstick hurricane, which I find fascinating considering that most of his other work was invisible, in radio. Equally wonderful is the supporting cast, who weather the nonsense with deadpan grace.
The fate of the young lovers comes to depend on how Babbs’s “Donna Lucia” navigates being courted by both of the girls’ guardians. What began as a ruse simply to stand by the couples as a chaperone spins crazily, following the absurd laws of farce and Benny’s over-the-top energy, until “Donna Lucia” becomes the linchpin of everyone’s happiness. Sir Francis wants her for her money — which she doesn’t have. Old Spettigue wants her for both for her money and her sex — which she isn’t. The father figures will approve of the juveniles’ betrothals if they can get from “Donna Lucia” what they want — and they can’t have. The funnier the situation becomes, the harder it is to see a good outcome. And all the while, Babbs is having the time of his life being both “Donna Lucia” and Not-Donna Lucia at the same time. (The varsity show drag would have been small change compared to all this.)
Seaton’s deviant script is wonderful. A lot of the humor came with the play, but Seaton added witty repartee and many inspired slapstick scenes that weren’t seen in any previous productions. (I have to believe that Benny was heavily involved in the process.) I love this one, as Sir Francis tries to land “Donna Lucia” while Babbs tries to land the whisky bottle.
Another great scene in Seaton’s script that’s not in the original play is Babbs’s trouble with stubble. Babbs wants to end the charade, but Jack hasn’t proposed yet. Agreeing to continue a while longer, he needs an afternoon shave before he can fend off the ardent Spettigue. The result is wonderful screwball.
I haven’t been able to establish whether the 1940 Broadway production that was the source of the film’s legal troubles altered anything in the original’s script. (I’ve seen images of the revival script and it appears to follow the original in ways that the film does not.) So I am assuming that all of the film’s changes were the work of Seaton and company. Another interesting improvement is the reworking of the proposal scenes. As the two bashful undergraduates manage to propose without actually proposing, the dialogue is almost Wildean compared with the emphatically mundane original. (It’s a nice decision, considering that Thomas’s play preceded Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest by a couple of years.)
Babbs tries again to end the charade but the boys need him to string Spettigue along until he gives his consent in writing for his ward to marry Charley. All of a sudden, who should appear but the real Donna Lucia, posing as “Mrs. Beverley-Smythe.” She asks Jack to convey a note to Babbs from their shared solicitor, asking for a meeting, during which she wants to discuss Charley’s affairs. Babbs has caught a glimpse of the gorgeous Kay Francis. He likes what he sees and is eager to meet her “as nature intended” him, as a man. When they do finally meet, she incognito and he in his proper “natural” attire, something weird happens. Benny, who has been freewheeling and ballsout in Donna Lucia drag, transforms himself into a pantomime figure. As he tries to put the moves on the not-unreceptive Donna, it’s as if he’s in a different comic posture altogether. Few Hollywood actors were as unconvincing as ardent heterosexual males as Benny (Eddie Cantor came close).
Almost as important for drag screwball as mistaken erotic identities are scenes of botched or incomplete transitions between the male and female identities, moments when the disguise threatens to fall apart. At some point, the gender-disguised character is in danger of revealing the secret in flagrante — not necessarily in a direct sexual predicament, but through glitches in the literal disguise, through dressing and undressing. In the original play, Spettigue almost finds Babbs in pants, which Babbs has discarded in a fit of freedom. Seaton’s script improves on it mightily in a hilarious scene we might as well call “The Wall.” After motivating Babbs’s change into male clothes by his meeting with “Mrs. Beverly-Smythe,” Babbs must hastily return to his biddy drag before Spettigue can discover him. Benny’s costume in Charley’s Aunt is a character in its own right. It was modeled on the costume worn in the play’s 1892 London performance, which became the archetype for many revived versions. It was later often invoked in Benny’s career and became an iconic reference point. It’s a complicated piece of clothing, replete with frilly knickers, petticoats, a loony matron’s cap and a lacy shawl. Sexy it’s not, but it’s a hilarious piece of business. In the film, Babbs’s frantic change of clothes, aided by the boys, is concealed from Spettigue by a garden wall in a scene that could have been staged by the Mechanicals in Midsummer Night’s Dream. And thus begins the revenge of the disguise.
First, a couple of corset gags straight out of vaudeville, as the real Donna Lucia tightens the screws on the faux one.
Then a loose garter gag, straight from the silents. The real Donna Lucia reveals she knows. Sir Francis espies the truth.
Written consent acquired, and Babbs accepted by the real Donna Lucia, nothing remains but how to reveal the truth to the company, especially to Spettigue, who expects to marry “Donna Lucia” as a reward for removing his block on his niece’s marriage. In an excellent improvement over the play’s resolution, Seaton’s script involves a culminating wardrobe malfunction. We haven’t seen any new costume glitches since the garter, so we don’t expect a new one, and we’ve all but forgotten about Babbs’s wig, which has behaved itself exceedingly well throughout the film. When it is unexpectedly hoisted off his pate by the guisarm of a suit of medieval armor, the truth is revealed to all. The last block is removed and a triple wedding can proceed.
Charley’s Aunt is a great film in its own right. It’s far superior to the prim drawing-room farce of Brandon Thomas’s popular play, not only because of Benny’s performance, but at least as much because of Seaton’s script. Unlike many of the leading slapstick directors of the late ’30s and early ’40s, Seaton didn’t learn his trade making comedies in the silent era. With that in mind, Charley’s Aunt is unique in the way it makes a wild and woolly screwball out of a well-made play. None of it would work without Benny’s amazingly physical comedy. The film, coupled with the one that immediately followed it, Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not To Be, mark the high point of Benny’s screen career. I don’t think Benny was a bad movie comedian. He was physically flexible (though never elsewhere to the degree as in Charley’s Aunt), but also prone to mannered posturing that borders on pantomime. His two masterpieces each emphasize one or the other of his styles. That said, Charley’s Aunt wasn’t just a high point, but also a turning point. Entertainment historians feel that the campy gay vibe that increasingly became part of Benny’s stage persona began in earnest after the film. It has been argued that the way Babbs strides around and spreads himself in Charley’s Aunt was, like the cigar chomping, a manner that was to emphasize his masculinity under the dress. Benny would never again throw himself around with such abandon. The gay-inflected humor of his later persona was very different. He relied more and more on the image of a pinched, cheap, smirky or vinegary victim. He avoided big gestures. He characteristically held himself close, arms tight by his side, gesturing with one arm at a time, threading his fingers in front of his body, all postures far from Babbs’s body in frenetic motion. A mincing walk became one of Benny’s trademark, again the opposite of Babbs’s bounding. Those later fussy mannerisms are already in full display in Lubitsch’s film, so if you want to see Benny in his only display of slapstick genius, Charley’s Aunt is the place to see it.