Fifth Avenue socialite Irene Bullock needs a "forgotten man" to win a scavenger hunt, and no one is more forgotten than Godfrey Park, who resides in a dump by the East River. Irene hires Godfrey as a servant for her riotously unhinged family, to the chagrin of her spoiled sister, Cornelia, who tries her best to get Godfrey fired. As Irene falls for her new butler, Godfrey turns the tables and teaches the frivolous Bullocks a lesson or two.
11 Dec My Man Godfrey (1936)
The Man
The 30s was when movies decided what they want to be.
You can spin one of three or four narratives tracing that development. One of those narratives casts genres as beings and has them duking it out, only a few surviving. In this narrative, you’d see a rope from the movies about stage performance to this, movies about life performance, to Citizen Kane (through “O Brother,” surely), where you have life and stage performances “folded.”
Another of those narratives follows the meme of stereotypes, especially sexual ones. In this tale, it is the identities that matter, that survive and all else is wrapping, container.
(I suppose if you are particularly broken or fundamentalist, you’ll adjust this to some Marxist or sexist or racist narrative.)
But today I choose the actor thread. We obsess about our celebrities today, but these folks in the 30s were truly important. Women of course, nearly always women. But of the men, William Powell is near the top of my list. If I were building these narratives, he would be one of the key male actors.
No, not Wayne or Gable or any of those folks who were celebrities first and actors second, and then only acting themselves. Powell seems to have understood how to bend the detective persona and may have been the first actor to noticeably wink at the camera. You and he were in cahoots when discovering what happens next.
Here he is teamed with his exwife Carol Lombarde and teases out of her one performance worthy of remembrance. She would have a similar screwball relationship with husband number 2.
So no matter what sort of narrative you build of the history of films, you will find it passes through this fine little project.
Posted in 2005
Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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