My Man Godfrey

Unfortunately I was quite ill for this class and subsequently had to download this film and watch it on my own time. What I found to be most interesting about this film is how similar it is to many popular, modern comedy/satire films and/or television series. As I watched this film I was constantly reminded of things like Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and even some written memoirs that have been receiving increased audiences and popularity in recent times, such as Augusten Burroughs' Dry and Running With Scissors. I found it particularly fascinating that a film that was made seventy-two years ago contains so much relevance and so many similarities to things being made in modern times. 2009 obviously is a radically different time, economically, socially, technologically, politically, etc., than 1936 was, and the fact that things being produced today bear likeness to things made in 1936 indicate that there are some ideas and methods of expression that remain universal to humans in a particular culture regardless of extraneous factors.

The only "screwball comedy" I had seen prior to My Man Godfrey was Bringing Up Baby. In fact, I had never even heard that there was such a genre as "screwball comedy", but now that I have been more properly acquainted with it, I realize that screwball comedy is indeed an apt name for such a genre. Both Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey carry with them a great deal of absurdity, something I find to be very refreshing in most older films. Generally, and admittedly this is a stereotype I hold on erroneous grounds, I find many older films to be difficult to watch, though obviously, not all of them. It seems to me that the acting is usually extremely melodramatic and over the top, which I find hard to take, but, with My Man Godfrey, that melodrama and ridiculousness is intentional, and that fact is where I get the sense that the film is refreshing when compared to many other films of the time.

Something I found interesting in the reading accompanying My Man Godfrey is the fact that screwball comedies tend to be extremely fast paced- this is something that I had not thought of and at first thought to be perhaps a crude generalisation, but upon thinking of Bringing Up Baby in particular, I remembered how consistenly annoyed I was with Katharine Hepburn's incredibly fast-paced, annoying, and unceasing yapping (this is not meant to be pejorative, presumably the character was intended to be such a way). I realized that one element of the screwball comedy is indeed a speedy tempo, and upon further reading, noted the author's stating that My Man Godfrey does not rely so heavily on this device, instead focusing more on abruptness and non-sequiturs. While watching the film, I had not come to the conclusion that the film was riddled with non-sequiturs (I love using non-sequiturs, they are a signature part of my sense of humor) and thought that the lines the author mentioned were more like very sarcastic-abrupt jokes. Non-sequiturs, to me, are statements that tend to elicit awkward moments with little logical response, and many of the jokes in My Man Godfrey did not seem, to me, to fulfill those requirements, and consequently, I just took away from the film a sense of great satire.

I think that politically and socially My Man Godfrey's plot was, whether intentional or not, intended to provide an escape for those watching the film during the greatest economic crisis of our country's history, The Great Depression. The fact that the rich people in the film are typically portrayed as so scatterbrained, inept, and ridiculous could be said to perhaps act as an assuaging agent for the widespread poverty and economic crises that many American families faced at the time the film was made. After all, films, books, video games, and many other forms of media are typically used as methods of "escapism". If the country were in the worst economic situation it had even been in, who would want to go watch a film about a group of extremely depressed, poverty-stricken, somber homeless folks?

Ultimately, My Man Godfrey was, for me, an enjoyable film to watch. I appreciated (at least in the version I downloaded) the better production value than that of Stagecoach or White Zombie, and was surprised to find out that the budget for the film was actually relatively high for the time, around $656,000. Furthermore, I found it to be strikingly similar to many satires of the current film/television industry, and this has changed my opinions on the datedness of many older American films.