My Man Godfrey: The Right Kind of People

Lombard was and remains one of the most beloved stars of the thirties, and My Man Godfrey is her most famous role, though her character is 180 degrees from the actress’s own lightning intelligence and common sense. “She told me My Man Godfrey was her toughest picture,” recalled her friend the director Mitchell Leisen, “because she had to be nutty, slaphappy, goofy, and her lines lacked continuity, were unrelated and without thought. They were hard to grasp.” Peter Bogdanovich claims it was Lombard who inspired a nameless Variety critic to christen the entire genre: “Lombard has played screwball dames before,” remarked the reviewer, “but none so screwy as this one.” One resolutely uncharmed critic, Graham Greene, contemptuously described Irene as “the brainless ‘lovely,’” but this is unfair. Irene has a brain, it just runs on a different track . . . and occasionally off the rails or under a viaduct. But Irene has a lot to contend with, starting with Cornelia’s relentless sibling rivalry. And she has kindness and charm, which both Godfrey and the audience can see right away, even if it eluded Greene.

Casting Lombard was the kind of masterstroke that takes a movie from “well-remembered by cinephiles” to “eternal classic.” Irene is the key to the picture; if she irritates the audience, so does the film. Initially, however, La Cava didn’t want Lombard, preferring instead Constance Bennett, who had comic abilities but lacked the instantly lovable quality that Lombard had in spades. It was Powell, everyone’s first choice for Godfrey, who insisted on his ex-wife; he and Lombard had been married from 1931 to 1933, afterward maintaining a sincere friendship that is no more common for former spouses in Hollywood than it is for exes anywhere else. Both Powell and Lombard studied real-life models for their parts, according to Lombard biographer Michelle Morgan. Powell observed his own butler, emerging with a newfound respect both for his employee and for Godfrey, who passes immediately as a perfect specimen. Lombard, on the other hand, modeled herself on La Cava’s secretary, “who was just the type,” according to Leisen. One wonders how well a film set could possibly function if one of its key employees were a real Irene Bullock, but fortunately La Cava was one of the most unbuttoned directors of the studio era. 

Born in Towanda, Pennsylvania, in 1892, La Cava was the son of an immigrant Italian shoemaker. He studied art before becoming first an editorial cartoonist, and later an animator, for Canadian innovator Raoul Barré’s studio and then for William Randolph Hearst’s International Film Service. His wild humor and willingness to experiment were already well in place by the time he started making two-reel comedy films, on occasion with his friend W. C. Fields. Fields, in turn, christened La Cava “the second-funniest man in America.” By the time La Cava took up My Man Godfrey, he had made numerous features, including The Half-Naked Truth (1932), which starred Lee Tracy as a carnival pitchman and helped establish the La Cava pace for plot and dialogue (breakneck); Gabriel over the White House (1933), a transcendently weird protofascist fantasy about an archangel put into the body of a corrupt U.S. president so he can Straighten Us All Out; and The Affairs of Cellini (1934), which turned the Florentine goldsmith’s biography into a Renaissance sex farce spiced with a few attempted murders. 

La Cava’s personal politics remained eccentric in Godfrey, based on the premise that poor people just need jobs and rich people have the inalienable right to be nuts. The movie dances around the issues of the day, but La Cava never exactly settles anywhere. The line “Prosperity is just around the corner,” uttered sarcastically more than once, was said in 1932 by Republican vice president Charles Curtis, and often attributed to President Herbert Hoover by people who didn’t like him. Clearly the still-unprosperous masses remained annoyed about that line in 1936. Meanwhile, the “forgotten man” trope comes directly from a 1932 radio address by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, during his campaign to replace Curtis’s boss.

La Cava sets up these real Depression-era concerns only to neatly solve them all. But the rescues that people fantasize about can be as telling as reality. My Man Godfrey hints at its particular brand of make-believe from the first frame, with the credits’ towering art deco signs that flash on and off, their reflections sparkling on what can only be the East River. And then, the punch line, as the camera slides down to what lies beneath all that glamour: a garbage-dump Hooverville, lit by trash fires and peopled by forgotten men about to turn in for the night. But Godfrey isn’t forgotten, as we find out fairly early on, if we haven’t guessed already. He is a wealthy Bostonian who decided that the cure for a broken heart was to go live with hobos. Like a benign version of Gabriel over the White House’s presidential angel, Godfrey, once employed by the Bullocks, soon has an opportunity to rescue them from the financial mess they’ve been merrily ignoring in favor of tea parties and their protégé. And ultimately, thanks to his machinations, a glittering nightclub, and source of jobs, rises like a phoenix from his former ash pile. After all, this dump was, as the credits hint and Godfrey jokes early on, a prime Manhattan location. Look at that bridge view!