Forever Screwball, Forever Fearless (Published 2008) (2024)

“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 Hitchco*ck’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.