MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Mein Mann Godfrey [de])

USA 1936
d: Gregory La Cava
Criterion (Region 0 us)

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Heartless screwball classic, directed with clinical glee by the still undervalued La Cava and scripted by the mysterious Morrie Ryskind, who began with the Marx Brothers and later drifted into weepies and right wing politics. Godfrey (Powell) is the high-minded tramp found during a society 'scavenger hunt' and led back by the more than lovely Lombard into her household, full of profligate madcaps who duly become a little more civilised. The film has lost some of its allure over the years, but it's still streets and streets ahead of the addled whimsy favoured by latter-day Hollywood.
— GB, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The rich are made to look very foolish and the poor appear very noble in this film, something that Depression audiences must have appreciated. Two years later, a film inspired by this one, MERRILY WE LIVE, was released, but it and the flat 1957 remake of MY MAN GODFREY were inferior attempts at recreating the chemistry of this film. Powell and Lombard, married in 1931 and divorced in 1933, were still friendly enough to make a marvelous onscreen team. One of the better, if not the best, of the famous screwball comedies of the era, GODFREY stands as an excellent example of witty scripting, direction, and editing. With Eugene Palette (growling some of the best lines, and certainly one of the strangest, funniest men ever), Alice Brady (great in these dithery roles), and Mischa Auer (in his famous monkey imitation) among the congress of nitwits. Look fast--there's Janie Wyman in the party scene.
— TV MovieGuide
•••••
Among his colleagues, Gregory La Cava enjoyed a reputation as master of improvisational comedy on the set. If My Man Godfrey, one of the great Thirties screwball comedies, benefits from La Cava's admirable sense of creative collaboration, it owes its spontaneous feel no less to that great screwball herself, Carole Lombard. As Irene Bullock, the rich girl spoiled - not rotten, but dizzy - by her environment, Lombard displays an incredible genius for acting like a seven-year-old child and a woman in love at the same moment. The object of her affections is Godfrey (William Powell), a philosophical gent who makes his home among the Depression's "forgotten men" at the city dump. Irene captures him as part of a socialite scavenger hunt, then keeps him on as her own private protégé and butler to her zany family. "La Cava demonstrated a detestation of the rich as his one undying social concern...." (Robert Smith, Glastonbury Film Society)
— PFA
•••••
It's Hollywood, but it's also New York, along with the dazed awareness that New York was a jungle of greed and indifference, but absolutely the most modernist place we had. Hollywood was still a small country town in the thirties, and it adored (and deplored) New York. After all, a scavenger hunt in which a forgotten man is one of the requirements? Is this heartlessness—or is it satire? Yes, of course, it's funny, and mildly moralistic in its way—Godfrey does do his best to educate this brimmingly dysfunctional family. But as written by Morrie Ryskind and directed by Gregory La Cava (still underrated), it is the speed, the wit, and the insolence that are so rich—and the indifference extends to that dreary problem-solving mentality which in time becalmed storytelling in film and television. As in the world of Preston Sturges, being crazy answers everything.
— David Thomson