Going Against Godfrey Grain

He Should Have Chosen Cordelia

I’ll be heretical and say flat out that William Powell as Godfrey would have been better off with Cordelia Bullock, as played by Gail Patrick. I would not have wished Carole Lombard’s Irene even on gorilla man Carlo (Mischa Auer), though they are a better match for my money. Having so blasphemed a settled classic of screwball comedy, it remains to ask myself why the resistance to a story and its resolution that generations have embraced and continue to. Comedy for me, apart from Snub Pollard, Keystone Kops, or the ilk, is drama with humor elements. We are dealing with people and their problems which I will take on face value and regard seriously. It may not be fair to screwball ethos, but I expect characters, at least ones I am expected to identify with on any level, to act sensibly, and to me, it is not sensible for Powell as Godfrey to enter willingly into marriage with such a birdbrain as Lombard’s Irene. Willingly is an operative word, for it always seemed he was forced by circumstance, and her insistence, to speak vows against his better judgment. Godfrey is an intelligent and educated man, he and Cordelia islands of acuity amidst chaos those surrounding them represent. Easy to forecast is Irene ending up like her mother, nattering and foolish, Godfrey’s marital outcome a mirror to Alexander Bullock’s (Eugene Pallette). In the Godfrey world I predict, he would drift toward infidelity with sister Cordelia, with whom it’s clear by a third act he has sympathy with and much more in common. As for Irene, opposites may attract, utter opposites less so. Godfrey and Irene as a sustaining couple after fade-out is not to be believed, and I reserve the right to believe or not in movie outcomes, even “screwball” ones.

The Cast Getting Direction from Gregory La Cava

Godfrey and the Woman I Would Rather He End Up With

I tend to invest fully in comedy situations, even, some say, to a point of over-analysis. We watched a Friends episode a few weeks ago where Joey fails an acting audition and I said it wasn’t right for him to be so humiliated, that it wasn’t funny, and that humor was undone where a character likeable as Joey is made such a fool of. Comedy is a most fragile of arts. If you don’t want me to take Godfrey’s situation seriously, then put him on a unicycle with a handlebar mustache and let trains chase him. Otherwise, I will judge his choices, or mistakes in choosing. The end of My Man Godfrey sees a good and sympathetic man (and never mind it’s one of my favorite actors) trapped in a ceremony he will regret, regrets even as it proceeds. Here’s the thing with Cordelia: She is scheming and guileful, “high-spirited” as Godfrey tactfully puts it. He realizes they were raised in similar circumstance (“There have been other spoiled children in the world. I happen to be one of them myself”). If Cordelia grew up entitled, so did Godfrey. For his greater age and experience, Godfrey knows that maturity is within Cordelia’s grasp. He acknowledges that she taught him humility and "the fallacy of false pride." Besides that, Cordelia is attracted to Godfrey, and he to her (my reading admittedly, but scenes tend to bear it out). I’d like to think that Cordelia, defused by Godfrey having saved the Bullock fortune, would acquire a “more constructive” attitude, the two headed for a happy ever-after. 

Lombard as performer was not at fault, as I’m told she was directed (by Gregory La Cava) to go full out madcap. Her Irene rides a horse into the Bullock mansion and parks it in the library, thankfully off-camera. Madcap that stops being funny becomes exhausting. Powell saves Godfrey. We could wonder how things would turn out if Melvyn Douglas or Robert Montgomery played his part. For how many films was casting the charm, or tip-over? More urgent: What OK films might have been classics had they been cast better? Back to Lombard on the horse: If a gag were more alarming than amusing where actually shown, is it less so when someone refers to it as a past event? Anecdotal account of Irene indoors and astride amuses me no more than its visual reality would. How will Bullard staff adequately clean rugs and tile once the animal is removed (after being there all night … Gads!). Pardon if I seem arbitrary. If My Man Godfrey weren’t such a fine picture, I’d not go so deep in the well with it. What confers greatness is often the contradictions within movies we love. Sometimes it’s hard to express even why we gravitate to them. I admit being that way about My Man Godfrey and at least a hundred others.

Does My Man Godfrey expose the “evil of capitalism”? At least one modern commentator says yes. The rich, we are told, are rightly ridiculed in screwball. It is said this calmed the proletariat. Was it also to quell threat of social revolution in the 30’s? I doubt the rich cared, since being rich will cushion a lot of hurt from being teased. Alexander Bullock knows his wealth is tenuous, that a family he wishes he’d never started is frittering assets away. It would have been hard, even in 1936, to resent or dislike Alexander Bullock. They say audiences were reassured by movie millionaires being invariably worse off than themselves, a given that money did not confer happiness, taught time and again by Hollywood. Godfrey is sympathetic because he fled the yoke of riches. Fact is, had he not come of aristocracy equal to the Bullocks, any inter-marriage would have been ill-advised. What 30’s heiress saw anything but grief for running off with her chauffeur? Godfrey reminds me of noble savage Tarzan turning out to be Viscount Greystoke so that proper English Jane could couple with him without stepping out of her class. Godfrey brings added benefit of being a Wall Street wizard capable of turning Bullock ruin into riches, his having gone to Harvard a story element planted early so we’d know he was worthy of elevated status. Godfrey having lived in a dump is little more than opportunity to see how a lower half lives, since a quick telegram to home in Boston or withdrawal from a trust account could put him back in chips at any point of the narrative. Godfrey calling scavenger hunters, including the Bullocks, a “bunch of empty-headed nitwits” may have been a sop to class-resenters in 1936, and now, but really, these are his people and it’s more than a little disingenuous for him to mock them so. Maybe Godfrey deserves to end up with Irene after all.