Tag Archives: William Powell

Libeled Lady

October 9, 2011 By in Movies Tags: , Leave a comment

 

It’s amusing to think that the most elegant and sophisticated couple in film history met in the back seat of a car. Myrna Loy and William Powell were making Manhattan Melodrama, a movie as formulaic and dull as it sounds, and the director W.S. Van Dyke was in a hurry as usual. “My instructions were to run out of a building, through a crowd, and into a strange car,” Loy wrote 50 years later. “When Woody called, ‘Action,’ I opened the car door, jumped in, and landed smack on William Powell’s lap. He looked up nonchalantly. ‘Miss Loy, I presume?’ I said ‘Mr. Powell?’ And that’s how I met the man who would be my partner in 14 films.”

 

The key word in that anecdote is “nonchalantly.” That was the style Powell and Loy developed in the mid-’30s—cool, dry, and airy despite whatever melodrama, Manhattan or otherwise, happened to be unfolding around them. In fact, the more dramatic the situation (for example, a wife catching her husband with another woman, or someone waving a gun around) the more distant and amused they became. Trapped, like all the other actors of their generation, in clichéd plots and by-the-numbers scenes, they looked at each other skeptically — he with lips pursed, watching to see how she would react; she with narrowed, suspicious eyes as if he had arranged it all in a transparent, failed attempt to please her.

 

Their impact was so strong that their detached superiority itself became a cliché — dozens of actors from Dean Martin to Maggie Smith to Bill Murray have used it over the years to signal cynical disbelief at the movies they’ve been stuck in. What Powell and Loy had that nobody ever quite duplicated was a deep mutual understanding and respect. They were peerlessly adult and worldly (they were never called by their first names, like Fred and Ginger — that “Miss Loy” and “Mr. Powell” is very telling). But they weren’t stuffy about it. They may have treated the plots and characters around them as a private joke, but they locked in on each other with tremendous focus. After their first film, Van Dyke paired them in The Thin Man, which made them a world-famous team and bonded them forever in the public’s mind. But it’s their fifth film, Libeled Lady, in which their romantic chemistry is at its most potent and moving. It’s probably their best movie.

 

One measure of how wonderful Powell and Loy are in Libeled Lady is that they turn the other actors into run-of-the-mill supporting players. When your co-stars are Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy, that’s saying something. Harlow and Tracy play the contrasting couple — the floozy and the tough mug who go toe-to-toe with the two urbane sophisticates. They’re good, but in this case they’re not in Powell and Loy’s class. The movie was made a couple of years after the enforcement of the Production Code, when MGM was trying to fashion a new persona for Harlow. She had become famous playing trollops, poured into skin tight satin gowns, her unworldly platinum hair and hard, angled face shining in the key light. Once the Code was in force, they began to tone her down, and here she has evolved into a fairly standard movie tart: loud and ungrammatical, but with a slightly dinged heart of gold. Harlow gets top billing in Libeled Lady, and she’s capable and likable, but she’s also a bit tiresome as she stomps her feet and launches into yet another tirade.

 

I don’t know what to say about Tracy. Katharine Hepburn once compared him to a potato (she meant it as a compliment), and that’s pretty apt. He’s solid and meaty. He’s there. But he’s not very exciting. There’s a case to be made for Tracy as the most overrated actor of his generation; he’s still considered some sort of giant, but it’s more residual reputation than actual achievement. He never could play comedy, or more accurately, he wasn’t personally funny aside from whatever business or line they gave him. In comedies, he tended to act like an overgrown puppy, putting his head down, looking up with his big brown eyes, shuffling and stumbling, raising his voice to bark at the other actors. In Libeled Lady, he plays a standard ’30s part—the ruthless, manipulative, anything-for-a-story newspaper editor. Cary Grant made the same character charismatic and hilarious in His Girl Friday, but the best Tracy can manage is to be a good sport.

 

Here’s the plot: Loy is the richest girl in the world, who is suing Tracy’s paper for libel over a false story about a romantic entanglement. The suit would ruin the paper, so Tracy hires Powell to seduce Loy and put her in a compromising position; in order to make Loy look like a homewrecker, he convinces his own fiancée Harlow to marry Powell… platonically. It’s a tightly woven farce plot, none of it very original even at the time, but it serves to keep the four stars at cross-purposes so they can bicker and double cross each other. It’s like the ancestor of a sitcom. The director was Jack Conway, an anonymous MGM hack whose chief virtue was that he knew how to keep things moving briskly. Libeled Lady is almost a perfect catalog of ’30s movie comedy situations and devices — people bite each other, elegant gowns are kicked away impatiently, insults are hurled and then topped. As written by Maureen Watkins, the author of Chicago, some of the wisecracks are pretty good — for example when Harlow complains that someone talked to her like a house detective. “How do you know what a house detective sounds like?” Tracy demands and she fires back: “Doncha think I read?”

 

What makes Libeled Lady memorable is the delicacy and heart of Powell and Loy’s playing. At first, of course, they’re adversaries. Hired to make love to her, he begins by trying to ingratiate himself with her on a trip on an ocean liner: isolating himself with her, subtly arranging for physical contact, telling her what beautiful eyes she has. As he comes up with one sleazy strategy after another, she regards him with infinite and increasingly open shades of distaste. Her father (Walter Connolly, the perennial sputtering father of screwball comedy) is an avid fisherman, so Powell works that one, pretending to be a fishing expert. When Connolly excitedly tells Loy that Powell is an angler, she replies that yes, he seems like quite an angler. This leads to an extended scene in which the three go trout fishing in a raging river, and Powell takes a series of pratfalls and spills while trying to appear like a world-class fisherman — he has a very wet instruction book in his creel basket, though he can’t hang onto it for long. One of the great comic sequences of the decade, it led to Howard Hawks making an entire movie around the same premise called Man’s Favorite Sport? (unfortunately, Rock Hudson was no William Powell).

 

Eventually, Powell’s pursuit of Loy leads to them falling genuinely in love, and at that point something wonderful happens. With all the mechanical farce conventions ticking away around them, you expect him to be exposed, and he is. You’re ready for the inevitable confrontation, hurt feelings, and breakup that lasts up through the final explanation and forgiveness, but it never comes. She instantly understands what’s happened, and there are no recriminations…even though he’s still technically married to Harlow. Powell and Loy are too mature, too wise, too grown up for tedious spats. Audiences loved The Thin Man movies, and still do, for their portrait of a witty, companionable marriage full of teasing and wisecracks. Libeled Lady shows the courtship phase of that same relationship, and it’s as satisfying as you always hoped it would be.

 

First published on Edward Copeland on Film.

 

My Man Godfrey

September 6, 2011 By in Movies Tags: , Leave a comment

Games With Human Beings as Objects

The opening of My Man Godfrey constitutes a little movie in itself — a perfectly balanced mixture of satire, wit, anger, and glamour that may be the greatest single scene in 1930s cinema. It starts with the credits, which are integral to its meaning. We see the Manhattan skyline at night, and to a fanfare the names of the cast and crew light up in neon signs that flash on and off, reflected in the East River below. The camera pans across buildings that slowly become less grand, more industrial, more forgotten and squalid, and finally it comes to rest at the city dump underneath the end of the Queensboro Bridge. The brash music subsides into the first few plaintive notes of the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” The camera moves in and we see a lonely shanty, a hobo tending a fire, a dog sniffing through the trash. A dump truck backs up and adds more garbage to the pile, a cascade of cans and rubbish that glitter like diamonds in the moonlight. And then we see him. The hobo tending the fire, we discover, is William Powell.

Even today, it’s a bit of a shock to see this actor playing a bum. Powell, the epitome of class, the man about town who wore clothes beautifully, smoked and drank cocktails with peerless elegance, and spoke with impeccable clipped diction. With one twitch of his pencil-line moustache, William Powell could register infinite degrees of skepticism and wry sophistication. And here he is, bearded and shabby, speaking in a low, hushed, defeated tone of voice. He trades a few bitter observations with another bum as a couple of snazzy cars pull up at the edge of the dump. Three well-dressed people rush out: two women and a man. The women are sisters, played by raven-haired Gail Patrick and blonde Carole Lombard. The darker one, Patrick, gets to Powell first. How’d you like to make five dollars? she asks. Powell doesn’t quite get it. Brusquely, she offers the money again and tells him all he has to do for it is go with her to the Waldorf Ritz hotel where she’ll show him off to some people. She’s on a scavenger hunt and her next item is a Forgotten Man — the evocative, accusatory Depression-era term for a homeless person. Do you want the money or don’t you? she snaps at him. That’s enough. He advances on her with barely controlled aggression, his voice quiet but vibrating with resentment. She falls back and lands on her ass, then runs off in fear with her escort. Powell, still furious, strides in the other direction and runs smack into the blonde.

Her name is Irene, she tells him, and that was her sister Cornelia and she’s always wanted to do what he just did — push Cornelia into a pile of ashes. He offers to push her in too, and now she’s the one to decline the offer, but not angrily. She’s a ditz, rattling off disconnected observations and thoughts a mile a minute. The moonlight illuminating her fluffy head of hair and shimmering satin gown, she’s like an angel come to rest on the dump. Powell’s irritation turns to curiosity. Would you mind telling me just what a scavenger hunt is? he asks. She takes a deep breath. “Well, a scavenger hunt is exactly like a treasure hunt, except in a treasure hunt you try to find something you want and in a scavenger hunt you try to find something you don’t want.” Like a Forgotten Man, he says. “That’s right, and the one who wins gets a prize, only there really isn’t any prize, it’s just the honor of winning, because all the money goes to charity, that is if there’s any money left over, but then there never is.”

With this and her other long screwball speeches in this movie, Lombard plays a subtle trick, her voice trailing off at the end as her character becomes vaguely aware that something is wrong. It isn’t that she’s dumb. She’s infantile. She has grown up in a bubble, insulated from the world by her wealth. Ease and luxury have stunted and stupefied her. Confronted with Powell’s steady gaze, her voice begins to wobble and her scattered attention focuses on him, like a baby seeing its parent and calming down. So they sit and talk, the rich girl and the bum becoming interested in each other. It even makes her philosophical. “You know,” she says, “I’ve decided I don’t want to play any more games with human beings as objects. It’s kind of sordid when you think of it, I mean when you think it over.”

This little quip goes by in a flash, but it’s amazing when you think of it. I mean when you think it over. Like the whole scene, it expresses a bristling sense of moral outrage. The Forgotten Men come out of the shadows after Powell threatens to punch Cornelia’s top-hatted escort, asking if he needs any help. They’re a little society, watching out for each other, keeping their dignity despite being literally at the bottom of the heap. In an era and an industry in which conservative values dominated (don’t they always?), here is a full-throated cry of humanism and populism. The movie makes us vaguely, uncomfortably aware that we’re tourists, just like the three rich people. We’re drawn to Powell by his toughness, his intelligence, and his irony, but we’re also a little appalled. He looks like shit. He lives on a garbage heap. How did he get here? And how can he — and we — get out?

The rest of the movie is the answer to those questions, and it’s not an entirely satisfying answer. Lombard takes Powell back to the scavenger hunt, wins the prize, and hires him to be her family’s butler in their Park Avenue mansion. It’s a screwball comedy out of P.G. Wodehouse: the level-headed servant civilizes the house full of wacky rich people, and the boy and girl fall in love. Although the rich are satirized and vilified, and the value of good honest work is celebrated, the movie can’t sustain the brilliance of its beginning. It’s well acted by a team of expert farceurs including Eugene Pallette, Alice Brady, and Mischa Auer. It looks great, with its sleek art deco sets and sparkling cinematography by Ted Tetzlaff. And it sounds great, with its flow of wisecracks by Marx Brothers writer Morrie Ryskind, but in the attempt to create a box-office romance, something goes awry with the plot. We learn that Godfrey, Powell’s character, is actually from a wealthy family himself, but a broken love affair left him devastated and he fell into poverty and homelessness because he didn’t care what happened.

This is a major letdown — we’re supposed to be soothed by this reassurance that Powell is “respectable,” but in fact we were much more on his side when he was a bitter bum of ambiguous origins. The romance between Godfrey and Irene works only because Powell and Lombard, real life ex-spouses and good friends, have genuine chemistry. Unlike most comedies of its era, in this movie the man is much smarter than the woman, and just like in real life, that’s not very romantic or particularly funny. On Park Avenue, the movie is pleasant and enjoyably proficient, but back on the city dump it was, briefly, extraordinary.