Every bit as charming and cheerful today as when it was first released in 1936, My Man Godfrey remains one of the early pinnacles of the screwball comedy. The zingers fly with machine gun speed and land with bullseye accuracy. With William Powell and Carole Lombard each operating at the absolute height of their powers and perfectly matched as, respectively, a droll manservant and a kind-hearted but scatterbrained heiress, My Man Godfrey zips along with nary a misstep. The new Blu-ray from Criterion only highlights the glitzy joys of the film, making the work of director Gregory La Cava shine all the more.
La Cava’s background was in animation, and you can feel that eye in the way he builds the world of the wealthy Bullock family, a world that Powell’s Godfrey is quite surprised to suddenly inhabit. Along with romantic hijinks, class warfare was a major theme for early screwball fare, and La Cava’s bold strokes, bordering on caricature, are perfectly suited for this send-up of the idle rich.
My Man Godfrey may be unmistakably of a different age, but the humor still sings, the performances still delight, and its views on class and social standings have only grown sharper as the years have passed and more and more artists have tackled the same subject.
As My Man Godfrey starts out, the man Godfrey (Powell) is living at the very fringes of society, warming his hands by trash fires on the city dump along with the other “forgotten men” left behind by the world at large. Godfrey’s poor and lonely (but also peaceful, dignified) life gets suddenly and loudly interrupted by the arrival of sisters Cornelia (Gail Patrick) and Irene (Lombard). The Bullock girls, you see, are participating in a scavenger hunt along with all the other spoiled twits of the NYC elite, and one of the items on the list is a so-called “forgotten man.”
An annoyed Godfrey sends the snooty Cornelia sprawling into an ash pile, but he takes a shine to the ditzy but kind Irene and helps her win the game, taking the opportunity also to give the blue-bloods what for. Delighted, and sincerely moved, by Godfrey, Irene insists he comes to work for her family as their new butler.
What seems like a lucky break for a down-on-his-luck working man turns out to be a touch more complicated, as Godfrey must now contend with a vengeful Cornelia, a smitten Irene, the girls’ bubble-brained mother Angelica (Alice Brady), her mooching “protégé” Carlo (Mischa Auer), and bull-headed family leader Alexander Bullock (Eugene Pallette). Combined, the Bullocks are a runaway freight train of oblivious spoiled monsters. But Godfrey proves to be as unflappable as they come, and he has a secret or two of his own up his sleeve…
Certain actors do certain things so well, it becomes impossible to disassociate one from the other. In the case of William Powell, if he didn’t invent the art of being memorably drunk on screen, he sure as hell perfected it in movies like the various Thin Man titles. But as Godfrey, he’s playing the straight man for much of the film, maintaining a determined steady manner even as the clown car of shortsighted nuisances that is the Bullock family gets dumped on him throughout. Powell bears it all, able to modulate the stoicism just enough at times to nail whatever beat the scene calls for, whether it’s a punchline or an unexpected emotional awakening (it helps too that the film does make time for one stretch where Powell does indeed get fantastically drunk, and watching Godfrey stumble-stagger with Powell’s usual long-legged anti-grace is even funnier than when it’s Nick Charles doing the same).
As for the Bullocks themselves, everyone has been cast to type and everyone is playing their material to the absolute hilt. You’re not going to find a better mug for a slow burn than Pallette (probably best known for playing Friar Tuck in Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, a role for which the Kansas-denizen made zero [0] attempts to alter his accent or disposition, bless ‘im), and it’s perfectly suited for the material. Pallette’s one of those guys who always seems to have a Loony Tunes-style smoke-stream steaming off his head, and it plays like gangbusters.
The rest of the Bullocks seem almost like proto-Bluths, particularly the flamboyant leech Carlo as played by Auer in an Oscar-nominated turn. Carlo will grow frantic if anyone so much as mentions money in his presence, yet he’s all too happy to greedily eat anything and everything that comes close to hand, all while lounging around the house all day. An early scene where Angelica (Brady, also Oscar-nominated) demands Carlo play-act as a gorilla to cheer up a seemingly inconsolable Irene builds and builds to surreal extremes that wouldn’t be out of place in The Square.
But ultimately the film lives and dies on Powell, Lombard, and Patrick. Powell and Lombard had actually already been married and divorced before he recommended her as his co-star here, insisting (correctly) that no one but Lombard could play the role properly. She’s a dream as Irene, somehow being instantly lovable without ever underselling what a daffy brat Irene can be, and the sheer tonnage of verbiage that Lombard spits out is rivaled only by the likes of Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell. And the real life connection between Powell and Lombard leads to real sparks in the film. She brings both a gentleness and a real steel out of Powell, grounding what could have been a trifling bit of movie silliness in something that feels adult and real.
Patrick is every bit as good playing the temperamental opposite, all icy cool and half-purred, half-snarled insults. Both Bullock sisters are theoretically loathsome, but both Patrick and Lombard do wonders at establishing the insecure children behind the dazzling fashions of socialite life. When Cornelia finally breaks, it’s an almost full-bodied transformation that Patrick conveys with a mere two words. Both Powell and Lombard would pick up Oscar nods (My Man Godfrey was the first film to have nominees in all four Oscar categories), deservedly so, but Patrick was unfortunately overlooked despite being integral to the film’s entire chemistry.
La Cava builds a sumptuous playground for these fools to battle and scheme and love in, predicting later eras of visual comedy with a surprising depth of frame within the Bullocks’ house. Both Carlo and Irene are prone to striking poses of artistic agony (in his case) or crippling ennui (in her case. “What is food?” is the best proto-philosophical weariness that Irene can summon), while their family and friends continue unperturbed around and in front of them.
The Criterion Blu is probably as good as the film has ever looked, conveying the lush world of bored wealth even in crisp black and white, benefiting from a new 4K digital restoration. And the disc also comes with an essay from Farran Smith Nehme, news reels that better establish the class context in which Godfrey and Godfrey exist, and a radio adaptation of the film.
All in all, My Man Godfrey remains one of the great American comedies, and Criterion has done right by the film in such a way that will hopefully ensure it will continue to be discovered and enjoyed by future generations of film lovers, remaining relevant for as long as the wealthy continue to need a good stiff kick in the pants every now and again.