My Man Godfrey · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Water first. The camera drifts along the East River at night, the credits burning over the skyline as illuminated signs, and then the signs run out and there are ash heaps with men living in them. Nobody has spoken yet. Ted Tetzlaff shoots this stretch low and dark, figures picked out of shadow against the city glow across the water, the way the newspaper pictures of that decade shot a bad address. He will shoot the Bullock house bright and glossy and deep, Carole Lombard held in the soft close-ups a star was owed. Two photographic styles in one picture. The argument is on screen before the first joke.

Then the joke. A socialite on a scavenger hunt needs a forgotten man, a real one, worth points. Godfrey is available. She takes him home and makes him the butler. The derelict with better manners than his employers was not a new idea; Ruggles of Red Gap had run it the year before, and McCarey had already found there that a valet's bearing could indict a household without a line of protest in it. What Gregory La Cava added was the bracket. The film keeps going back to the river.

Deleuze sorts classical cinema by the work its images do, and the workhorse is the action-image: a character reads a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. He splits it in two. In the large form, an immense situation presses down until one decisive act transforms it — the threatened town, the sheriff, the empty street at noon. Godfrey has an immense situation lying around. It is called the Depression and it is in the first shot. The film never once takes the large form. It runs on the small form, where the arrow points the other way: an act discloses a situation we could not otherwise see. Deleuze puts much of the burlesque tradition here. Godfrey cooks, manages, keeps his head, and each competence peels back a layer of a household that cannot feed or govern itself. Read this as a romance and it looks broken: Irene pursues, Godfrey resists, the love story arrives late and behaves like an imposition, and the plot is settled by his capability rather than by anyone recognizing anything. Read it as small form and every scene is doing its job.

The pearls make it clean. Cornelia hides her necklace in Godfrey's room to frame him for theft. Godfrey, who found it first, sells it, plays the market, and uses the proceeds to pull Alexander out of the securities he has improperly pledged. One object, two situations, and for a long stretch we cannot say which one we are in. Deleuze calls that an index of equivocity: a gesture or object that would sit equally well in either of two situations, so the situation has to be inferred from it instead of the reverse. Godfrey is one himself. Every act he performs reads twice — servant's labor, and a patrician's discipline. Class as performance is that ambiguity turned into a household.

Watch what Powell does with it. He underplays to the point of stillness, working in micro-inflections and delayed reactions, while Lombard plays at full extension and hurls herself at the furniture. Neither modulates toward the other, and the comedy lives in the gap. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that displays a social relation rather than describing it a gest. Powell's carriage is the film's gest. It says master, in a house that employs him, and it never says it aloud. Both instruments were built elsewhere. Hawks had broken Lombard of her mannequin diction in Twentieth Century, pushing her into instinctive, full-body playing at a shrieking upper register. The Thin Man had fixed Powell's unflappable throwaway register, comedy made by refusing to react. La Cava, who worked from thin scripts and found his scenes in rehearsal, aimed one at the other.

The house does the rest of the arguing. Charles D. Hall, who designed Dracula and Frankenstein for Universal, gives La Cava a vast, vertical, badly inhabited pile whose grand staircase is a class diagram, and Godfrey's movement along that axis, pantry to bedroom to drawing room, is the plot. Deleuze would call such a composition a closed set: everything inside the frame is information, and the frame behaves as a system. The staircase is its symbol, the one object that condenses the relation the whole film is about. The set stays porous. Pallette's bass grousing drifts in from offscreen and keeps the rest of the house alive next door. La Cava stages in depth, four and five performers at once with business at the edges, which is Dinner at Eight's grammar for a society household as connected performance rooms; the overlapping cues in one crowded room come from The Front Page. Then the ballroom scavenger hunt, cut into a crossfire of short shots and colliding bodies. Deleuze's word for a crowd treated as a single affective unit rather than a set of people is the dividual. The leisure class arrives as noise.

Now the real move. Deleuze describes an impulse-image whose world is naturalist: beneath the social surface lies an originary world of raw appetite, and it pulls people down a slope. Everything about 1936 says the ash heap is that world. La Cava puts it upstairs. Carlo, the household's resident protégé, eats and apes and produces nothing, and his gorilla routine runs without dialogue, pure silent-comedy business, a drive loose in the drawing room. Angelica calls the family condition pixies. Idleness is the film's illness, and the mansion is a Gothic set from the man who built Frankenstein's. The men on the ash heap are the ones who talked Godfrey out of the river after a romantic humiliation brought him there, and taught him self-respect, a confession he makes to Tommy Gray straight and without irony, in a film willing to stop being funny for three minutes to let him. The appetites are on Fifth Avenue. The sanity is at the dump.

Renoir would shut a house like this three years later in The Rules of the Game, by another road and independently; Deleuze reads such worlds, an ordered aristocratic totality rotting inside its own reflections, as crystals in decomposition, with no outside available. Godfrey has an outside, a few hundred yards off across the water. That is also why the ending hurts. Godfrey builds a nightclub called The Dump on the shantytown site and staffs it with the men who lived there, an outcome triumphant and evasive at once. The theory says why. The small form can disclose a situation; it has no machinery for transforming one. Transformation is the large form's job, and the large form here would require a solution the 1936 audience would not have accepted. The film declines to pretend it has one. Most screwball used poverty as a costume its lovers pass through on the way to reconciliation. This one gave the poor names, kept them on screen as a population, and ended among them. Sturges took up the harder version of the question in Sullivan's Travels five years later.

The legacy is easy to trace. The eccentric-rich-family ensemble became a durable Hollywood machine: You Can't Take It with You and Holiday two years on, and at a distance the deadpan dynastic comedy of The Royal Tenenbaums. The servant as moral center outlived the Depression into Arthur and Trading Places, and Parasite runs the apparatus backwards, keeping the infiltration and the vertical architecture and dropping the benevolence. For decades this film circulated in public-domain dupes bad enough to collapse Tetzlaff's two registers into one gray blur, so a great many people who loved it had never actually seen its argument. The restoration hands it back. Watch for the staircase, and for what Powell is doing when nobody is talking to him. Then ask whether the marriage imposed on him in the last minute cancels the ash heap in the first, or whether La Cava, who put the river at both ends, made sure it couldn't.