“MARVELOUS girl — crazy as a bedbug” was the great director Howard
Hawks’s considered assessment of Carole
Lombard, the young leading lady of his raucous 1934 farce, “Twentieth
Century,” which made her a star. Hawks was no mean connoisseur of female
marvelousness — he later performed similar star-making services for Lauren
Bacall, in “To
Have and Have Not,” and Marilyn
Monroe, in “Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes” — and 1934 was a very good year to be a crazy girl on
screen. During the Depression everybody was at least a little deranged, and
movie audiences liked to take their doses of comedy in the form of giddy,
helter-skelter romantic farce, the style known, then and now, as screwball.
Carole Lombard, blond, beautiful and fearless, was the pre-eminent screwball of
her mad, desperate time.
In honor of her centennial, Film
Forum is laying on a decent-size retrospective: 23 films, which began Friday
with a double bill of “Twentieth Century” and another of her most famous
pictures, Gregory La Cava’s “My
Man Godfrey” (1936). Lombard is bedbug crazy (and marvelous) in both, but in
entirely different ways. In “Twentieth Century” she plays a diva-like actress,
Lily Garland, who is trying, with little success, to wiggle out of the clutches
of her ex-lover and mentor, the flamboyantly manipulative theater director Oscar
Jaffe (John
Barrymore). It’s one of her wildest, most assertive performances, and it has
to be, because going up against Barrymore in full cry is a formidable challenge
for a relatively unknown young actress: subtlety wouldn’t have gotten her very
far. So she shouts and rolls her eyes and stamps her feet and generally flings
herself about, and manages to fight Barrymore to a draw. (Lily isn’t as
fortunate with Oscar.)
But in “My Man Godfrey” she’s quiet, distracted, almost wispy, playing a
goofy Park Avenue socialite who has, to her surprise, fallen in love with her
family’s new butler: for most of the picture she just follows suave Godfrey (William
Powell) around their swanky digs, moonily, pausing only occasionally to
meditate on the unfairness of life and/or the cruelty of fate. She glides
soulfully, Ophelia-like, across the polished floors; her words come out in a
soft rush, in breathy blurs of romantic nonsense.
In most of the other movies in Film Forum’s series Lombard (who died at 34 in
a plane crash in 1942) is neither as rambunctious as she is in “Twentieth
Century” nor as diaphanous as she seems in “My Man Godfrey,” but you never catch
her doing anything halfway: she throws herself wholeheartedly into even the most
unpromising parts. (Of which, especially early in her career, there were many.)
An actress of that era would frequently find herself playing variations on a
few stock roles — a ditzy heiress (as in “My Man Godfrey”); a dutiful wife; a
spunky, hard-working single gal; a shady lady; a sleek adventuress — and Lombard
did them all, with unusual and often unwarranted conviction. It’s remarkable to
watch her, for instance, impersonating a prostitute attempting to go straight in
Edward Buzzell’s 1932 melodrama “Virtue”:
her face is touchingly open when she’s with the man she loves, hard and opaque
when she’s with anybody else, and her voice changes timbre too, from delicate to
tough and back again. The movie is unworthy of the loving care she puts into her
performance, but you can’t help feeling grateful.
And in John Cromwell’s sudsy domestic drama “Made
for Each Other” (1939), Lombard, as the stalwart spouse of glum,
disappointed James
Stewart and the mother of a sickly child, somehow succeeds in making this
plucky household heroine seem as noble as she’s intended to be. It’s thankless
work, but Lombard appears not to be aware of that: there’s something almost
childlike about her ability to believe in her characters. When, late in this
shameless picture, Stewart tells her (on New Year’s Eve no less) that their
marriage is over, and she replies, in a whisper, “Let’s dance,” the reading is
so simple it breaks your heart.
Usually, though, Lombard employed this extraordinary capacity for self-belief
for more wholesome purposes, like making people laugh. The vast majority of the
movies in the series (which runs through Dec. 2) are comedies, and many of those
involve, in one way or another, people putting things over on other people: a
really remarkable number of screwball comedies are about swindles, confidence
games, boldface lies, impostures of every variety — and brazen imposture
happened to be Carole Lombard’s special talent.
The character she plays in Henry Hathaway’s extremely odd “Now
and Forever” (1934) is half of a globetrotting husband-and-wife team of con
artists (Gary
Cooper, brutally miscast, is the other half); in Wesley Ruggles’s hilarious
“True
Confession” (1937) she’s a pathological liar who confesses to a murder she
didn’t commit (don’t ask); in another Ruggles film, “No
Man of Her Own” (1932), she looks the other way while her card-sharp husband
(Clark
Gable) fleeces one rich sucker after another.
She was a star, that is, at a time when make-believe was the order of the
day, and movie audiences didn’t much care whether what was being put over on
them was benign or, maybe, a little bit nasty. There was some strange pleasure
to be had in the spectacle of people not being who they seemed to be, some
comfort in the idea that you didn’t have to be who, in
those stressful times, you actually were.
Probably the best role Lombard ever had was that of a Vermont woman named
Hazel Flagg, who, in William A. Wellman’s “Nothing
Sacred” (1937), fakes a fatal illness just so she can live it up for a while
— at the expense of a circulation-greedy tabloid — in glamorous Manhattan.
“Nothing Sacred,” written by the former Chicago reporter Ben Hecht (who, with
Charles MacArthur, also wrote “Twentieth Century”), is one of those superbly
cynical Depression-era newspaper comedies in which the Fourth Estate is
portrayed, with ambivalent affection, as the biggest con in town. Hazel Flagg
fits right into this self-delusive world, the bright-lights culture of big-city
tabs and their credulous readers.
 
And Carole Lombard slips into this role like a model into a clingy haute
couture evening gown, wears it as if she’d been born in it. Hazel fools
everybody — even, at times, herself — and Lombard lets you see every tiny
flicker of the character’s wavering belief in her own performance, and makes it
all blissfully funny. Hazel’s stunt, like the extended stunt of Lombard’s
career, is tricky, improbable. You’d have to be crazy to try it, and crazier
still to pull it off.
CAROLE LOMBARD ON DVD
Carole Lombard isn’t as well represented on DVD as she ought to be. “Nothing
Sacred,” sadly, is currently available only in public-domain editions, of
variable quality.
“The Carole Lombard Glamour Collection” (Universal, $26.98) features six of
her ’30s Paramount comedies, including “True Confession.” There’s a spiffy
Criterion edition ($34.99) of “My Man Godfrey”; “Twentieth Century” is available
from Sony ($14.94). MGM has issued “No Man of Her Own” and “Made for Each Other”
(both $14.98). And her last two films, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 “Mr. and Mrs.
Smith” (Turner, $19.98) and Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 “To Be or Not to Be” (Warner,
$19.98), are available too. Neither is among her — or the directors’ — best, but
they are worth seeing.