A Movie I Don't Understand: "My Man Godfrey"
There's a scene in Wonder Woman, from 2017, when the actor Chris Pine does something wonderful. The sequence takes place in 1918, and Pine is talking on an old-fashioned phone, the kind attached by a cord to a box on the wall, with an earpiece at one end and a mouthpiece at the other. Gal Gadot, playing Wonder Woman, is standing next to him, listening in, so he tilts the phone down so she can hear, holding it about ten inches from both of their heads. And then Pine turns away from Gadot, still talking, but now holding the phone perpendicular to his face, the way people do these days when they have their cell phones on speaker.
It's an amusing moment, a habit from our contemporary moment injected into a historical film, a character doing something they would not have done in 1918.
Explanations suggest themselves, some interesting and some merely banal. Perhaps the director thought that younger audiences would think it looked weird if Pine and Gadot pushed their heads together to both hear the earpiece, as two people used to have to do if they wanted to hear the same telephone conversation for the entire history of the device up until sometime around 2005; perhaps Pine was simply in the habit of talking on his cell phone this way, and the gesture slipped unnoticed into the film; perhaps someone suggested that holding the phone to his ear in this particular shot would hide too much of his gorgeous face, and so the decision was made to place beauty above anachronism.
Who knows. But what the moment shows is the difficulty of translating between the then and the now in movies.
In the same way that stories about animals – say Watership Down or The Lion King – are never really about animals but about people (or else we could not understand them, for none of us is capable of experiencing what goes on in a rabbit's head), movies about different time periods are never really about those periods at all. They are, instead, about our period, and about what we would like to make that earlier time period represent.
The best recent example of this that I know is the horror/adventure film Overlord from 2018, in which a squad of American soldiers in World War II does battle with zombies spawned by the Nazis.
The makers of the film decided that they would portray a racially integrated combat unit, replete with a black sergeant in the mold of Apone from Aliens or any number of surly black police commanders who have popped up on the screen in the past forty years. The fact that there were no integrated American combat units in the second World War doesn’t slow down the filmmakers any more than the fact that people in 1918 didn't hold their telephones perpendicular to their faces slows down Chris Pine. Nor does the fact that the cliché of the surly black commanding officer didn't appear until thirty or so years after the film is set prevent them from indulging in it.
What's complicated here is not the rationale behind this – Overlord is not making any claims on realism, after all, and there are great reasons for the push for integrated casting in Hollywood – but the effects of it.
Primary among these, for my purposes, is the fact that it adds another twist to thinking about movies that show different time periods, because it forces us to remember that we are watching, as it were, two movies at once. One shows us something that happened back then; the other shows us how certain people at the time the movie was made understood their now, as well as how that understanding shades their presentation of the back then. So when we watch Overlord we are watching a movie in some sense about World War II, and at the same time watching a movie about how contemporary people are trying to grapple with their understandings of World War II and how that war should be presented.
This same dynamic, if inverted, also applies discussion of old movies themselves.
When we watch something from nearly a century ago, we are trying to comprehend a story they were telling about their now; at the same time, we're balancing that comprehension against our understanding of our own now and the judgements that this understanding makes about the back then. When we watch older movies, in other words, we cannot watch them from the point of view of the audiences of their time, much like filmmakers can never make historical films from the point of view of the moment they depict. Instead, we're always comparing the time of the film to our own time and comprehending it through that lens.
Or at least that's what re-watching My Man Godfrey this week brought to mind for me.
The film, directed by Gregory La Cava and released in 1936, tells a classic Depression-era tale. (Or what reads to a contemporary viewer as such; whether viewers of the time would have seen it as a "classic" accounting of their moment seems to me to be an open question.) It begins with a band of wealthy revelers in New York City engaging in a scavenger hunt. A pair of sisters named Irene and Cornelia Bullock (Carole Lombard and Gail Patrick) descend on a city dump with their friends in tow. Their mission is to find a so-called "forgotten man" – what we would now term a homeless person – and convince him to accompany them back to their party so that they can win the prize in the scavenger hunt.
They come across one Godfrey Parke (William Powell), who is living with the other homeless fellows at the dump. He's annoyed by the condescending Cornelia but ends up being charmed by her younger sister Irene, who's flighty but ultimately good-hearted. Godfrey accompanies Irene back to the party so she can win the contest; after one thing leads to another, he ends up taking a job as a butler for the Bullock family.
Hijinks, as they say, ensue. The Bullocks are comedically bonkers. In addition to the spoiled sisters, there is the put-upon father Alexander (Eugene Pallette) who has secretly lost the family fortune, and the slightly addled mother Angelica (Alice Brady). The latter has a "protégé," who is a young Italian fellow named Carlo (Mischa Auer, in a wonderful performance), who does nothing but mope around all day exhibiting his melancholic tendencies and eating large quantities of the Bullock's food.
As in Boudu Saved From Drowning or Down and Out In Beverly Hills, the Bullocks eventually become fond of this stranger in their midst. Godfrey manages to save the family fortune for Alexander, and draws a flirtatious ire from Cornelia that eventually turns into an attempt to seduce him. At the same time, Irene falls in love with him, and is convinced that Godfrey has in turn fallen in love with her.
In the course of all this, it's revealed that Godfrey himself comes from the Boston upper crust, which he renounced after a disastrous love affair. He was on the edge of killing himself over the matter when he met the men at the dump, whose never-say-die attitude helped rescue him from despair. At film's end, Godfrey and an old friend from Harvard become business partners and – using funds earned during the escapade that helped save the Bullock family fortune – start a booming nightclub at the dump which employs all of the "forgotten men" who were living there.
In the final scene, Irene drags the mayor into the office of the nightclub and convinces him to marry her and Godfrey, who submits…but, it must be noted, never utters a word actually indicating that he loves her or is interested in marrying her.
It's a wonderful film but, as I've indicated in the title of these notes, one I do not understand. Here are two of the several confounding questions the film raises for me. First, why does Godfrey marry Irene? And second, what is the film trying to say about wealth and poverty?
As I noted above, Irene is flighty and spoiled. She’s quick-witted at times, but has none of the sharp intelligence of a character like Rosalind Russell's Hildy in His Girl Friday, nor any of the endearing eccentricity of Katharine Hepburn's character Susan in Bringing Up Baby, to bring up examples from similar movies.
The design of the narrative seems to be to assert that Godfrey is so wounded by his previous brush with love that he's incapable of even knowing himself that he has fallen in love again; because of this, it's up to Irene to realize that he loves her, and to drag him into that realization. The pivotal scene, in her mind, is when she makes him so annoyed that he hauls her into a shower and turns the water on. She would not have been able to get under his skin so completely, she declares, if he did not love her.
And yet the film does little work to support this. Godfrey never actually seems to be in love with Irene; the film makes almost no attempt to give her attributes that would help us see her as endearing rather than annoying; and his silence in the final scene, as she's arranging their marriage, seems to speak volumes.
The film works. It's funny and insightful and charming. And yet at the center of it, there is this strange hole. Does Godfrey really love Irene? And if so, why? The beginnings of the answers to these questions, I suspect, are related to the difficulties of era-translation that I mentioned above.
One way to understand this is to note that love means the same thing now that it did then, and also means something different. There is a magical, overwhelming, force-of-nature quality to love in certain movies from that era that I think we have nearly entirely lost today.
This is not to say that there is no magic in love today as it appears on the screen, because of course there is. But it's notable, I think, that in contemporary stories – I'm thinking of things like Crazy, Stupid, Love or Knocked Up or The Invention of Lying or Yesterday – love is frequently tied to redemption. One of the characters is doing something wrong, living against their principles or stuck in a pattern of behavior that makes them a jerk, and it is only by addressing this flaw that they can earn the hand of the other. Love, in other words, is often closely tied to personal improvement or empowerment; it only comes once you have earned it by mending your ways.
In My Man Godfrey, on the other hand – and this is a trope common to many screwball comedies from its time – the characters do not change to earn love. Instead, love takes the shape an immense external power they cannot avoid, even if they want to.
Irene falls in love with Godfrey, and knows (or believes she knows) that he has fallen in love with her, and there's simply nothing that can be done about it. Neither of them changes, and there is certainly no need for Irene to display endearing qualities: love, like some massive, implacable force of nature, has chosen them to be together, and so they will be.
Godfrey's silence in the final scene becomes, in light of this, not some dark indicator of his lack of agency towards Irene, but a simple acknowledgement of his lack of agency in the face of love itself. (It is this lack of agency that sets the film apart from more modern films that dabble in the idea of love as a cosmic force, along the lines of Sleepless in Seattle).
So perhaps love, in 1936, was not seen in quite the way it is now. Perhaps the idea of it as a force that demands submission, whether or not one wants to, had a currency that has been lost to us. Perhaps this all even has to do with some subterranean element of the gender roles of the day, as if the only power that women were allowed was the mystical one of calling in the Great Gods of Amor.
Perhaps. Is it a satisfying explanation? Does it address the hole at the center of the movie? Or is there something being lost in these questions, something as small but telling as the way people hold their phones to their faces, something that existed in the now of 1936, but which we necessarily misinterpret because our lens is that of our now? I don't know.
Because it might also be the case that this first confounding question – of love, Godfrey, and Irene – is tied to the second one, which concerns what the film is trying to say about wealth and poverty.
Along those lines, too, the film seems to me to be difficult to understand. It opens with a clearly satirical, biting depiction of the socialites of its day. The wealthy folks at the scavenger hunt party are presented as out-of-touch idiots, reveling in nonsense while the real folks – the "forgotten men" – struggle with the effects of the Great Depression. And Godfrey, when he comes among these rich fools, serves as a kind of everyman foil. He is wise while they are frivolous; he is hard working while they are indolent; he is humane while they are insensitive.
In all of this, the opening of the film seems as though it will be a cautionary tale about the callousness of the wealthy and their disregard of the national tragedy that's occurring around them.
But then we find out that Godfrey himself is a brahmin, Harvard-educated and from a wealthy family in Boston. He is among the "forgotten men" voluntarily, because they are the only men he could find who have the moxie to keep putting one foot in front of the other when the going gets rough. There is a class-based condescension here, as well as an almost forced naivete about the Great Depression itself, that is difficult to overstate. All the rest of the men live on the dump because they've lost their jobs due to economic calamity; Godfrey joins them because he had a bad break-up with a woman, and then saves them all because he grew up wealthy and is well-educated and has good connections.
Which is to say that in the first part of the film the ordinary folks are the heroes and the wealthy folks the target of scorn, but by the end the wealthy folks are the heroes who save the poor through largesse. Beyond this, the "forgotten men" have in essence been reduced to a function: through their noble suffering on the dump, they have allowed Godfrey to get over his heartbreak and find love again, as well as allowing him to feel good about himself (and the viewers to feel good about him) by starting a business that employs them.
And this is where the connection of rich and poor to the strange love story of Godfrey and Irene comes in. I wrote above that Godfrey doesn't overcome some character flaw to earn Irene's love, nor does Irene ever really become endearing. But something has changed in Godfrey: he's gone from being poor (even if voluntarily) to being wealthy again.
Much as the "forgotten men" have served a function for Godfrey, he has served a function for Irene. In her words in the closing scene, he is her "responsibility." She has rescued him from poverty and restored him to his rightful state as a wealthy man, and so – much as in the old adage that claims that if you save someone's life you are responsible for them – she must continue to take care of him. The implacable force of love, that is, weighs as heavily on her as it does on him: if he has no choice but to submit to being cared for, then she has no choice but to submit to the responsibilities entailed by her elevation of him back into the ranks of the wealthy elect.
So what, exactly, is the film's view of wealth and poverty, of the Great Depression itself, and of the relationship of the rich and the poor in 1936? And how is this all connected to its view of love?
The easy way out of all these questions, and it's one I frequently employ myself, is to say something like that the film is caught in contradiction. Perhaps it is even an incoherent text, in the way those were understood by the late great Robin Wood, one of those films that in his words "do not know what they want to say."
But there are times when it seems to me better, and more honest, to admit that perhaps the difficulty lies not in the text but in the difficult, often spooky attempt to translate between then and now. Love, wealth, poverty, the value of work – all of these meant different things in 1936 than they do in 2022.
And perhaps we can make sense of those changes. But perhaps we simply cannot.
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