Sean Burns
The funny thing about Carlo is that he’s always eating. He’s never the focus of a scene and so inconsequential to the story he could barely be called a supporting character. Yet this musically gifted “protégé” of Mrs. Angelica Bullock, of the Fifth Avenue Bullocks, scores some of My Man Godfrey’s biggest laughs. Played by Mischa Auer, Carlo is a pet project for Alice Brady’s drunken, mercurial matriarch – the Breen office censors were adamant there be no suggestion that he’s her boy toy, but come on. The young man makes the Bullock family feel like patrons of the arts as he’s quietly eating them out of house and home. His plates heaped with chicken legs and his mouth too full to sing, Carlo mows down so much food that by the end of the movie, all director Gregory La Cava needs to do is show him chewing behind the piano to bring the house down. Then, in an exquisite bit of timing, he waits just long enough to score an entire second round of laughs by revealing that Carlo has somehow been playing the instrument with a sandwich in his hand.
Carlo is billed around eighth or ninth in the cast list for My Man Godfrey, which just goes to show you how many funny characters La Cava has coming and going in this freewheeling farce, which many consider the premiere example of the genre that came to be known as screwball comedy. In fact, according to screwball scholar and sometime practitioner Peter Bogdanovich, the term itself was coined by a Variety review of My Man Godfrey in which the critic noted that star Carole Lombard “has played screwball dames before, but none so screwy as this one.” Here she stars as spoiled rich girl Irene Bullock, whom we first meet tagging along with her conniving older sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick) on a scavenger hunt, in which members of the Manhattan elite try to score points by bringing eclectic items like farm animals or a “forgotten man” to their black tie party.
Irene’s instantly smitten with William Powell’s dignified hobo Godfrey, probably because of the elan with which he shoves her snooty sister Cornelia into an ash pile. Godfrey helps Irene win the contest, and in return she hires him to be the Bullocks’ new butler. Chaos reigns at the family’s Fifth Avenue apartment, one of those lavish, gleaming soundstage sets that offered an irresistible fantasy to 1936 (or 2026) audiences. There’s something of a revolving door for the service staff at the Bullocks’ place, but the shrewd, secretive Godfrey proves a far more adept manservant than anyone imagined from a bum living in a service container down by the river. His common sense wisdom and special set of skills come in handy, as a typical night on the town for Bullock gals involves stealing a carriage horse and hiding it in the kitchen. (La Cava gets incredible comic mileage out of an offscreen neigh.)
The effortlessly urbane Powell provides the suave center of the swirling madness, fixing all the Bullock’s problems while going to great lengths to conceal his real identity – a twist that isn’t exactly difficult to guess given the actor’s manner and bearing. Powell initially refused to take the role unless his former spouse Lombard was cast opposite him, which may be the first and last time in Hollywood history that an actor ever lobbied to cast his ex-wife. (Powell was engaged to Jean Harlow at the time.) It’s easy to see why he thought she was indispensable. Irene, as scripted, is such a loopy character that the entire picture rests on her shoulders. If we find her annoying, the whole thing collapses in on itself. My Man Godfrey is unthinkable without Lombard’s endearing ability to be completely out of her mind. The audience must, like Godfrey himself, surrender to her dizzy charms.
It’s to La Cava’s great credit that the madcap shenanigans never feel forced or shrill. The long, elegantly constructed scenes accumulate characters and momentum like a snowball rolling down a hill. There’s always someone like our friend Carlo, barreling in with a mouthful of banana and imitating a gorilla. Maybe the most relatable is the Bullock girls’ exhausted father, played by Eugene Pallette, who when facing possible jail time for financial malfeasance, looks around at his family and figures that if he goes to prison it will be the first peace and quiet he’s had in twenty years.
This was a glorious period in American cinema during which everyone spoke as quickly as possible. Even bad jokes sound funny if you say them fast enough. (Though My Man Godfrey doesn’t have many of those.) I recently attended a seminar by critic Jake Mulligan at which he convincingly argued for Carole Lombard being one of the key voices in establishing how people were going to talk in 20th century movies. She helped set the tempo with the rapid-fire, machine gun elocution that dominated screen comedy until boring “realism” came along and everyone started mumbling like regular people. And where’s the fun in that?
“My Man Godfrey” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Kanopy, Hoopla, and a variety of ad-supported services.
