PLAGUE DIARY 37: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

My Man Godfrey (1936)
It’s become a bit of a tyranny this — writing these blogs. It’s an addiction like any other. I sit down in front of the computer and I am tied to the act of writing, loving it — not hating it — but just, knowing that I will perish without it. Which makes no sense. It’s COVID-19 that’s supposed to get me. Anyway, here’s the real admission; I’ve never really understood screwball comedies. I’m ashamed because I should like them, but I don’t think my sensibility is anarchic enough. When comedy gets too nutty, I just can’t go with it. Bringing Up Baby has always confounded me. I love the sensibility and the performances, but truth be told I get insecure when things go really crazy. (Ditto: The Marx Brothers. I recognise the liberation in their lunacy, but sometimes it goes beyond comedy and becomes grotesque. I was afraid of Harpo and Groucho as a child, just as I was afraid of clowns.) So what does all this say about someone who is supposed to have a comic sensibility? Am I not really funny? My Man Godfrey is certainly an interesting film, and I’ve never, I’m afraid, seriously considered the work of director Gregory La Cava. I still don’t know what to make of him. It turns out he started in animation, and one can certainly see signs here, as everything is stretched beyond belief. But there is also something very serious going on, which is the basis of all great comedy. Which brings us to Carole Lombard. Again, I’ve never known quite what to do with her. I remember a comic actress friend many years ago exclaiming: ‘I just adore Carole Lombard, I just want to be her.’ But I’ve never been able to watch Carole Lombard without getting bored and/or anxious. I acknowledge her craft,  and she consistently portrays a singular, demented creature of her own devising. She reminds me of the British theatre director Derek Goldby (where is he now?)— who was a great director of comedies, but he directed What the Butler Saw (a play with the screwball sensibility that I find both alarming and attractive) and told the actors to play it seriously. It was a failure, but — a magnificent one. To me, that is Carole Lombard. Don’t get me wrong, she is obviously gorgeous and charming and funny as a hat (if that makes any sense) but she goes beyond beyond, and usually leaves me behind. This time I allowed her to take me along. William Powell is a hobo (which is what we used to call a homeless man) with a beard. You usually don't see William Powell sporting a beard (only that awful moustache) so he is actually quite handsome (it’s because he lacks a chin, but you know what they say about men without chins — God giveth when he taketh away). And for a moment I understood why Carole Lombard — as the dizzy society girl — falls in love with him. The film is charged with class politics, and they are not pleasant. A party of rich people on a scavenger hunt have been required to bring home a ‘forgotten man.’ The barbarism of this blatantly classist tourism is repellent; the rich are immediately implicated, especially Lombard’s spoiled older sister (Gail Patrick), who Powell pushes into an ash heap. But Lombard is another matter. Her character is Shakespearean, i.e. she instantly falls in love with Powell, and while everyone else in the cast is just being delightfully dotty, (Franklin Pangborn, Mischa Auer, Eugene Palette and Jean Dixon are all superb) Lombard is being ‘madly in love’ with an intensity that is terrifying, conjuring up Helena from A Midsummer Nights Dream. Also befuddling: she seems — as a character and a person — to be both acting and being dead serious a the same time — which is of course the definition of camp. She is both playing at being in love, and being in love. And of course there is something profound in that. Once she persuades William Powell to become her butler ("Do you buttle?” she asks, airily) she then starts leaning on columns, hanging on curtains and crying on couches, writhing around in a kind of sensual agony that is both sympathetic and unsympathetic, real and unreal, but still somehow desperately funny. She dances through philosophical speculation with an obtuse fury. When asked how she is, she says — “It doesn’t matter how I am — the whole thing is only a delusion” and then, out of nowhere — “Life is but an empty bubble.” These are delicious parodies of romantic philosophic melancholy. When offered an hors d’oeuvre, she inquires “What is food?” — instantly unlocking the riddle of anorexia. But La Cava is looking at more than just lovesickness. William Powell is not a real butler, but a rich man posing as a hobo, posing as butler, who has pondered The Great Depression and wondered at “how fast you can go downhill where you start to feel sorry for yourself,” especially when there were "People who were fighting it out and not complaining.” La Cava is obsessed with the spoiled excess of the filthy rich. Lombard’s potty mother (Alice Brady) natters on about how her ancestors didn’t arrive on the Mayflower — but (consolingly) they did arrive on “some boat.” I was told my ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and my father’s mother was a ‘Daughter of the American Revolution.’ Am I, then the spoiled one? It would seem obvious -- and obviously I would deny it. But La Cava seems to define not being spoiled --  not by just the sheer volume of hardship you endure -- but also by how much you complain about it. Now I’ve gone on about being gay forever, but I’ve never thought of it as a disability, or something that I need to be compensated for. On the contrary, it’s straight people I worry about (how do they endure that endless foreplay?). But — dare I say it? Well, you know I will. A friend of mine who frequents Africa remarked: 'What's the big deal about this whole pandemic thing? They have them all the time in Africa where they don’t have antibiotics. It’s just new for us.'  Well we haven’t run out of ventilators, or hospitals, or doctors and nurses — so isn’t it kind of spoiled for people to run around al the time worrying about their children (who are basically not at risk) or their 90 year old parents? It may seem like I’m the spoiled one -- just complaining about being cooped up here -- but I’m not. I mean I’m fine with my blog (though being co-dependent on it is spooking me out). What I’m really whining about is that our basic human rights have been ripped away, and I’m not certain exactly why. Could it be we’re just spoiled rich white people who have spent years trying to avoid the fact that we get old and we die, and COVID-19 has suddenly made that a reality we can no longer ignore? The homeless men at the dump where William Powell is discovered are casualties of the depression (something we are entering now, by the way) and they keep repeating over and over again, with wry mocking smiles, the false official message of cheer at the time — “prosperity is just around the corner.” That sounds as ridiculous as having to listen over and over again to the ubiquitous COVID-19 party line: ‘we’re all in this together”  — when we have never been so very much alone.