The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn
My Man Godfrey is a romantic comedy where all romance is an only act of giving in to the inevitable. Never has the term ‘falling’ in love been more accurate – everyone here does so without idea, or without willing. It ends with a marriage of imposition, and our hero winces as, in classic screwball fashion, he is finally overpowered by the divine, whirlwind, feminine. In all of this, in its accidents and reluctance, it is amongst the most romantic films I have ever seen.
Our hero is not who he says he is, identity not mistaken but deliberately obscured. Godfrey Smith (William Powell), a “forgotten man”, has risen from the ashes of Godfrey Park, a former playboy of the Mayflower variety. He is found at the city dump, a home for the homeless, by the neurotic Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard), who falls in love with him almost instantly, after he intimidates her older sister, Cornelia (Gail Patrick). Godfrey accompanies Irene to the Fifth Avenue scavenger hunt, a charity event where things that nobody wants are picked up and put down in a trifle to amuse the rich. Irene, reluctant to let her man go, offers him a job as the family’s butler.
What follows is a pursuit, of sorts, through a cavernous townhouse and an assortment of pleasantly unhinged relations, as Irene’s infatuation collides with Godfrey’s re-discovery of himself, his social conscience and, perhaps, his will to live. It’s a film about finding a sense of purpose and willing it for others in turn. Godfrey finds the meaning his life has always lacked, discovering a kind of subjectivity in the personal and social objectifications of both Irene’s affections and his role as the butler. It prompts him to pay it forward, to provide that same respite for his fellow forgotten men at the dump, giving them jobs and, in turn, purpose at the film’s close. And for Irene, who simply wants to be loved, the meaning of her own life lies in a domesticity she has never previously imagined for herself. Her marriage to Godfrey becomes an act of compromise – each gets what they want, by virtue of the other. Maybe they were made for each other, after all.
The film’s twin themes are class disparity and mismatched, impossible loves. They intersect and crossover, in questions of sex and propriety, and lust hangs around the edges, shrouded in implication. But in a picture that is not really about romance in the traditional sense, its most insistent charms are often its most conventional. Irene is kind but manic, a caricature of the emotionally unstable heiress. Godfrey is noble but withdrawn, reluctant to give himself away. We’ve seen this film before, and yet its pleasures lie in their fulfilment. Godfrey rejects life as an object without ever refusing Irene, and Irene learns to love, if not with maturity then at least with a measured abandon. They are not so different after all. When either one gives chase, the other falls into step, effortlessly, alongside them. It is a film of finding harmony, however atonal, whilst set in a world of discord. And when he confesses, pitifully, to feeling that old foolish feeling come on again, my heart melts.
Godfrey and Irene can’t last. They barely even begin. But each teaches the other something valuable in the time they have together, and in Godfrey’s final, marital, submission, there is the promise that they might at least try – not for peace, but maybe for understanding.
—
What do we talk about when we talk about eating the rich?
Godfrey and Irene’s romance of errors is played against the backdrop of the Great Depression. From the beginning, Gregory La Cava juxtaposes the frivolity of Irene’s life with the hardship of the world in which she finds Godfrey. In the film’s opening half hour, as Godfrey settles into the house, this is played as broadly as screwball ever is. Alice Brady is in fine neurotic fettle as Irene’s mother, twittering through every scene with the conviction that makes her an unfailing delight in any picture; Mischa Auer, Oscar-nominated here, plays Brady’s parasitic protegee, the artist who sells out without anything to sell. Gail Patrick is remarkable as Irene’s sister Cornelia, whose sin is pride but might as well be lust – all of her interactions with Godfrey take on threat because Irene is awake to their deeply sensual overtones, represented neatly by a black/white dichotomy in their evening wear. (And if there was ever a film where evening wear would be symbolic, it is this one.)
Godfrey is, for much of the film’s runtime, a man plucked out of poverty, embittered by his experience but willing to find himself anew, perhaps not in Irene’s arms but at least in her kitchen. Yet it is true, also, that his experience of homelessness is itself a pretension – we know, by the hour mark, that this life is a choice, made because of a broken love that drove him to embitterment and suicide. Irene, who poses in facsimiles of illness, is not so dissimilar from him after all. Neither is perfect, in perhaps the same way, but each of those layers must be stripped away before there can be love. The film’s point, in many ways, is to illustrate those journeys from obliviousness to empathy, Godfrey’s halfway complete and Irene’s beginning, albeit repeatedly detoured.
The early 1930s were no stranger to films about the idle rich and, in turn, their unique idolatry. In many of them, there is a didacticism that doesn’t translate as seamlessly for the modern viewer, who expects their social policy both sexier and more fulsome. Gold Diggers of 1933, a Joan Blondell/Warren William vehicle, is thrillingly socialist, and in being so is broadly an exception to the rule – but the sharp tonal turn at its end, from giggling sex comedy to political balladeering, still lands shockingly.
We’re Not Dressing (1934) is an example that sits firmly in the middle ground. Also starring Carole Lombard, it follows a group of wealthy layabouts whose ship runs aground on a foreign island; without the requisite survival skills, they are forced to rely upon the savvy of Bing Crosby’s deckhand, who uses his newfound power to woo Lombard’s heiress. This is, of course, the plot of Triangle of Sadness (2022), but it’s predecessor can at least boast the presence of Gracie Allen at her peak.
Down to Their Last Yacht (also 1934), meanwhile, fails dismally because it is confused about what it is. Bogged down in the kind of shrieking mania that beset many a B-movie of the period, it loses any notion of sharp satire in what is little more than a collection of scenes hung together on the vague theme of class conflict. And the classes, lest we forget, are Old Money, the Nouveau Riche, and The Others, embodied here only by the South Pacific natives it cannot quite be bothered to name.
My Man Godfrey is specific, then, in its specificity. If it does not provide a cure, it does at least present a diagnosis – the country is sick, men are rotting, and the government is not quick enough to act, even as Fifth Avenue socialites play tourist at the dump. Irene is a sympathetic character because she is empathetic in the face of not only callousness but active dismissal, and we root for her precisely because she yearns to reject her own ridiculous upbringing. Godfrey is sexy, aloof and intellectual, but he is also symbolic of rebellion, and all girls with kind hearts at some point must reach for the opposite of what their mother wants. Irene is sincere, but Godfrey is also convenient.
The Bullock family are not, and perhaps cannot be, the real upper class. They are saved from a dubious ruin by Godfrey’s kindness and forethought, and come to at least some truth about their nonsensical existence. The film imagines a world where the rich are dotty and frivolous, but essentially good, and easily given over to an idea of collective responsibility. This includes the man himself who, while committed to his new cause, has the privilege of being able to leave it at any time.
And yet this is the one thing Irene never finds out about him, knowledge given only to the audience. Irene loves Godfrey for all of his opposition – the knowledge that they are, in fact, the same, could only be a turn off. Her infatuation is universal, but the only thing Irene does not, and cannot, love him for is who he really is – perhaps, the blind rich are simply unlovable.
—
Love in My Man Godfrey is both imagined and past. Irene is obsessed with Godfrey, and with what he might represent – independence, intellect, an escape from the constant, and perhaps pointless, sentiment that defines her admittedly narrow life. In her adoption of his cause, and ultimately the reciprocation of her affection, she learns patience and the benefits of time. She learns that a world exists beyond her own, one that chews up and churns out men and woman alike, not just for the accidents of their birth but also for circumstance and incidence.
Even as the film reaches its comedic crescendos, there is a sense of sadness and nostalgia to it. Irene is just one of many in a house filled with unrequited want. She yearns for a domesticity that continues to elude her until the very final seconds. Molly, the wisecracking maid who hates the cops, loves Godfrey just as much – she shares with Irene a simple desire to sew on his buttons, and be in his presence. Household chores start to take on enormous importance: the wiping of a dish, the arranging of flowers in a vase. In the failure of all her grand gestures, Irene is left with little else but the simple ones, and cultivates an imagined world of bliss, away from the noise of her own home, where she can simply be with the man she loves. In the last reel, she gets a version of it – but the end seems in sight beyond the final frame.
Carole Lombard and William Powell, the film’s stars, are perfectly matched as a couple made up of an irresistible force and an old immovable object. Something has to give, as the song goes, and the film takes place across a war of attrition, as she gradually wears down Godfrey’s walls – walls that are in place because he was once as wilful and romantic as she. And when he feels “that old foolish feeling” coming on again, the water begins to pour in.
Powell and Lombard had, of course, been married, and their chemistry in the film comes from the knowledge of what once was had and now is lost. A fan of Powell’s before they met on the sets of the 1931 films Ladies Man and Man of the World, they were married the same year, divorcing 26 months later in 1933. They remained firm friends for the rest of Lombard’s life, with Powell recommending her for the role of Irene; when she died in a plane crash in 1942, he was distraught.
In a poignant example of how art invariably imitates life, the relationship between the two was not dissimilar to that between the film’s characters. With an age gap of sixteen years, they were also radically different; Lombard, foul-mouthed and joyous, Powell, reserved and intellectual. But incompatibility is of course an attraction in itself, and we rationalise our oppositions to the people we love, even as a relationship falls apart around us. Their separation was amicable, but it is a separation nonetheless. In friendships borne, initially, from romance, there is an ache that doesn’t go away, a pain driven directly from the knowledge that something cannot be.
The emotional climax of My Man Godfrey does not feature Irene at all. It is Godfrey’s departure from the house, as he explains to each member of the family what he learned from them and, in turn, what his parting gift will be. For Cornelia, it is the faith that she is not as bad as she seems. For Mr Bullock, it is the truth about his finances. But for Irene, the greatest thing he learned was, to borrow a phrase, to be loved and to love in return. Stripped of the formalities of his position, brought to his knees by a redoubtable woman, there is no choice left but to give in. And so he does, and that relinquishment, the act of letting go, is more romantic than anything I can think of. To meet someone where they are, and to help them, in the way they once helped you.
—
My Man Godfrey is a film about being understood, about being met on a plane the same as your own. Its philosophy is that the joy of love, of discovering and nurturing an empathy for someone else, is so much worth having that even its fleeting varieties are significant. In a world where fates hinge on the flip of a coin, and the line between poverty and luxury is only a scavenger hunt, there are worse things we can do than try to belong to one another.
Godfrey and Irene will not last. But they are held in time, and we do not ever have to worry about what comes after. In our own world, Powell and Lombard’s relationship was almost entirely aftermath, but these are the benefits of cinema – we pick our own endings, and if they are rewritten, then very well, we rewrite them.