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Carole Lombard: First Lady of Screwball

In at least seven movies, the exuberant Lombard became emblematic of the screwball comedy genre of the 1930s.

Carole Lombard: First Lady of Screwball

In at least seven movies, all of them comedies with serious undertones, the exuberant Carole Lombard became emblematic of the screwball comedy genre of the 1930s, and she passed into folklore with her marriage to Clark Gable and her death in a plane crash in 1942, at age 34. In 2008, the year that marked her centenary, one of many tributes included a “star of the month” program on the indispensable Turner Classic Movies, which screened such wonders as Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century and Ernst Lubitch’s To Be or Not to Be. In between those very different peaks, Lombard was the archetypal madcap heiress in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, a small-town girl caught up in the publicity machine in William Wellman’s cutting satire Nothing Sacred (written by Ben Hecht), a manicurist on the make in Mitchell Leisen’s Hands Across the Table, a congenital liar in Wesley Ruggles’s overlooked True Confession, and a demanding, hot-to-trot wife in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Those seven testaments to Lombard at her best are among 11 films included in the Criterion Channel’s “Carole Lombard: First Lady of Screwball” series. There are no samplings here from her frustrating early sound years, when she was a contract player for Paramount, but it’s worth delving into those films, if only to understand how she evolved as a comedienne. By and large, Walter Lang’s No More Orchids, from 1932, and David Burton’s Brief Moment, from 1933, prove that Columbia chief Harry Cohn knew how to display Lombard’s talent far better than her home studio: In the first scenes of No More Orchids, where she’s cannily cast as a flighty, drunken heiress, Lombard’s sense of fun shoots off the screen, as does her frank sexuality (she strips to her underwear with no self-consciousness). And she’s at once tough and tender, and nicely so, in Brief Moment, even if her face sends unintentional signs of her uncertainty with her role, a drawback that marks much of her apprentice work.

At the age of 20, Lombard made the silent short Harry Edwards’s The Campus Vamp as one of Mack Sennett’s bathing beauties, and she learned a lot from this training, as she seems totally at home within his world of anarchic nuttiness. She’s far less memorable in Fred C. Newmeyer’s Fast and Loose, which not only boasts dialogue by Preston Sturges and marks the feature-length screen debut of Miriam Hopkins, it also features a scene-stealing Ilka Chase, a non-dithery Frank Morgan, and Charles Starrett, the Guy Madison of the ’30s, in a bathing suit throughout. Perhaps inevitably, Lombard gets lost in the shuffle, looking almost scared as she recites her lines—a fear that would turn up again in such films as Frank Tuttle’s It Pays to Advertise, which is stolen by Louise Brooks in the first reel, and A. Edward Sutherland’s Up Pops the Devil, where Lombard has the lead but mostly just treads water.

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Lombard’s first husband, William Powell, helped to free her considerably across two films: Richard Wallace’s Man of the World and, especially, Lothar Mendes’s Ladies’ Man, which contains the first showcase of her special talent for extremes in a long, expertly played drunk scene. Alas, she’s forced and awkward in Alexander Hall’s Sinners in the Sun, which, sadly, doesn’t contain much sun or sin, though it does have two electric scenes with Cary Grant, in only his second film role. She worked up a palpable chemistry with Gable, her future husband, in Wesley Ruggles’s No Man of Her Own, a rather gloomy movie that still pulsates with the heat of their mutual attraction, but Paramount still didn’t know what Lombard was good at. They used her as an all-purpose leading lady, which might begin to explain her presence in Stuart Walker’s hilariously awful melodrama White Woman, which is stolen wholesale by a compellingly campy Charles Laughton as the owner of a rubber plantation. As a nightclub singer forced to marry Laughton’s perfidious character, Lombard looks great, but she seems exasperated and tired throughout, as if she’s acting badly to protest the assignment.

To Be or Not to Be
A scene from Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be. © United Artists

Even worse than White Woman is Wesley Ruggles’s Bolero, where Lombard has to try to act and even dance with a wooden George Raft. It’s a dull movie, but it does boast a defining moment for Lombard, when her character strips down to her slip and Raft, as her egotistical dancing partner, dares her to dance something for him. Lombard’s face lights up, as if she’s thinking, “What the hell” (or “What the fuck,” given her affinity for cursing like a longshoreman on the set of her films). Lombard was finally starting to relax and take chances on screen, which was evident again in Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century, where her lusty, throw-your-whole-body-into-it kind of physical comedy was showcased for the first time in a talkie. She was aided by the full-throttle histrionics of her co-star, John Barrymore, and Hawks’s patient coaxing behind the camera. The director enabled her to be herself at last: the high-spirited, dishy, flaky girl everyone loved off the set who had rarely come through on screen since the days of her slapstick Mack Sennett shorts.

Even though Twentieth Century signaled that she had arrived as a comedienne, Lombard still had to slog through a few more inappropriate programmers, including an uneasy partnership with Gary Cooper and Shirley Temple (Henry Hathaway’s Now and Forever), a nearly unwatchable try-out at MGM (Jack Conway’s The Gay Bride), and another “dance” vehicle with George Raft (Marion Gering’s Rumba). The dominant mode for Lombard in these films is censoriousness: She’s something of a pill, dressing down her male lead and looking fiercely angry and restless in most of her scenes. But it only took a gentle modification of this impatient quality for her star persona to really take shape, as it did under Mitchell Leisen’s direction in Hands Across the Table, the first real Carole Lombard movie, a melancholy and slaphappy romance where all her hard edges were finally smoothed away. There followed a string of classic comedies, some essential, like My Man Godfrey, and some diverting minor work, like William K. Howard’s The Princess Comes Across.

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It’s a shame that Lombard is such a diamond in the rough in her early films, but they’re all worth seeing, mainly because of co-stars like Hopkins, Laughton, and Grant. It took her a while to find her métier, but when she did, there was no stopping her. If you were to screen Up Pops the Devil, and then To Be or Not to Be, you might be forgiven in thinking that the early, unsure Lombard and the Lombard at the summit of her skill for a great director in a great, perilously bold movie were two different people. But her struggle to improve herself and find the right material is what makes Lombard such a quintessentially American, do-it-yourself movie star. In the mid ’20s, Lombard had a movie contract canceled when she got herself into a bad car accident that left a vertical scar on her left cheek. This scar is still visible in a lot of her close-ups, and it’s the reminder for us that she’s living on borrowed time. That retroactive sense of danger informs the giddiness of her comedy, the abandon of her sexual openness, and the “what the fuck” daring that lets her be a vision in white satin in To Be or Not to Be, swaying with overwhelmed carnality as she murmurs the ugliest imaginable words, “Heil Hitler…”

“Carole Lombard: First Lady of Screwball” is now playing on The Criterion Channel.

Dan Callahan

Dan Callahan’s books include The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock , Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, and Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave. He has written about film for Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Nylon, The Village Voice, and more.

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