It's definitely time to retire the term "screwball comedy," which is basically meaningless and useless. Do such so-called screwball comedies as Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby(1938), Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937), and Gregory LaCava's My Ma Godfrey (1936) actually have much in common? My answer is no, not in the way such genres as the Western, the film noir and the horror film do. But then, I am a splitter and not a lumper and LaCava's exploration of class values, McCarey's story of marriage and divorce and Hawks's celebration of irresponsibility do not seem related in any way (except, perhaps, that they are all funny, though even that is not a unanimous reaction).
Which brings us to Green's The Goose and the Gander. Green was a workmanlike director for Warner Brothers who directed five movies in 1935 (I have posted about five other of his movies). The script for The Goose and the Gander was by Charles Kenyon and could have made a quite funny movie,i.e., if it had better direction and a better cast. The only adept member of the cast is Kay Francis; her ability at comedy was not usually exploited except by the brilliant Ernst Lubitsch in 1932's The Trouble in Paradise, and in Green's film she often has amusing lines but hams it up too much. The only cast member who is consistently droll is Genevieve Tobin, who plays Betty, married to Ralph (Ralph Forbes) but having a fling with Bob (George Brent). Kay Francis plays Georgiana, formerly married to Ralph, who schemes to get him back by revealing Betty's fling with Bob. To add to the confusion there is also the married jewel thieves, Connie (Claire Dodd) and Lawrence (John Eldredge), who have stolen jewels from both Betty and Georgiana. It all gets sorted out at the jail after everyone is arrested (the film has many similarities to Bringing Up Baby), where Bob and Georgiana declare their love for each other.
No comments:
Post a Comment