USA 95m Dir: Gregory La Cava Key Cast: William Powell
A comedy about the upper classes, My Man Godfrey is highly regarded in some circles for it's social commentary.
One of the items in a socialite scavenger hunt is a "forgotten man" so sisters Cornelia and Irene Bullock head to the city dump to find a homeless man. There they meet Godfrey and Irene ends up hiring him as the family butler. When Godfrey arrives the next day he learns that no butler will put up with the eccentricities of the family. Little do the family know, Godfrey isn't all he seems.
This is classed as a screwball comedy so a fair amount of the film sees William Powell play the straight, professional butler in the manor of Jeeves whilst the family do silly things. Cornelia is constantly getting drunk and doing absurd things like riding a horse home and her mother Angelica is sponsoring lazy musician Carlo who spends all his time eating. There's also a plot about Irene who quickly falls in love with Godfrey who keeps avoiding her advances. Alexander, Cornelia's and Irene's father and Angelica's husband, despairs at the madness of his family.
The comedy is a mixed bag with the three female characters made to look like complete idiots. It feels like a sexist approach where only the men are sensible human beings. Really it's just a load of wealthy people being stupid and it occurs to me that actually in many films of this era the focus is on wealthy members of society having fun.
This is juxtaposed with the many homeless men living in the city dump and one of the highlights of the film is when Godfrey takes Irene there and shows her the reality of the world. This is well done but it's all let down a little by the fact that (spoiler alert) it turns out Godfrey is actually a very rich man who moved to the dump after a failed relationship. He takes over the dump and employs the homeless and though there's an intention to show the benefit of charity, to me the film is really saying that the only way to solve the social problems of the great depression is to have some rich person buy others out of it.
Screwball comedies are not really my thing and it's notable that they are perhaps the one genre of this era which never made it past the 1950s. The comedy is derived from people behaving in utterly absurd ways that no human being ever has. This one just about gets away with it because the funniest thing is William Powell's straight man reacting to the chaos but even then, it often stretches past funny and into irritation.
It's social consciousness is admirable even if it is often misguided and really William Powell is the only thing making this is a watchable film.
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