Guest Author - Peggy Maddox

In a recent interview on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, author and humorist Sarah Vowell got a laugh when she said she'd been reading the scripts of FDR's Fireside Chats to find comfort in the current economic mess,

NOTE: The fireside chats were a series of thirty evening radio speeches given by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1944.

Vowell said she was getting so down-hearted with the news that she "decided to go back to the Thirties and be reassured" because she wasn't getting any reassurance from today's leaders.

Maybe the same disenchantment with the current American scene prompted me to watch My Man Godfrey (1936) this week.

Starring one of my all time favorite actors, William Powell, My Man Godfrey, based on a novel by Eric Hatch, is set during the Great Depression.

Powell, as Godfrey Park, is discovered living at the City Dump by frivolous socialite Cornelia Bullock (Gail Patrick). She offers Godfrey five dollars to go with her to a party as a found object in a scavenger hunt. The useless rich have made the "forgotten men" living in poverty into pieces in a party game.

Powell, insulted that the woman would so dehumanize another human being, refuses and pushes her down onto an ash heap.

NOTE: Calculating worth on the basis of pay for unskilled labor, five dollars in 1936 would have been the equivalent of $183.71 in today's buying power.

When Cornelia has gone, Godfrey, giving his name as Godfrey Smith, agrees to go to the party with Cornelia's more humane sister Irene (Carole Lombard). Attracted to Godfrey even in his unkempt state, Irene hires him to be the family's butler.

From the beginning it should be clear to the viewer that Godfrey is no ordinary homeless
down-and-outer and when Godfrey's friend Tommy Gray (Alan Mowbray) comes to a party at which Godfrey is serving, we learn that he is in fact the son of a Boston family whose wealth and prestige go back ten generations. Depressed by an unhappy love affair, Godfrey had gone to the big city's Dockland area intending to drown himself, but instead took up residence among the penniless unemployed men living there.

Voted one of the "50 Greatest Comedies of All Time" by Premiere Magazine, My Man Godfrey is a morality play. It is the equivalent of one of FDR's radio broadcasts, meant to reassure Americans who are suffering bad economic times that they are better than the stupid rich and that not all the rich are insensitive to their needs.

The film received numerous Academy Award Nominations:

Best Writing: Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind
Best Directing: Gregory La Cava
Best Actor: William Powell
Best Actress: Carole Lombard
Best Supporting Actor: Mischa Auer
Best Supporting Actress: Alice Brady

Not very funny by today's standards, the film is a noisy romp that recalls the frantic activity of the eccentric household in You Can't Take It With You (1938), another Depression Era film intended to reassure poor people that they are happier than rich people.