Tea at Trianon: Carole Lombard’s Divine Lunacy

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Carole Lombard’s Divine Lunacy

One of the last photos of Carole Lombard before her sudden death

From The Criterion Collection:

Carole Lombard wasn’t a suits type. A clothes horse but not a mannequin, she was a study in paradox. She looked best in (first Travis Banton’s then) Irene’s slithery boudoirish satin gowns and negligees . . . and shorts, the swan undermined and complemented by the jock, the cutup making mincemeat of the dreamgirl, the siren embracing clunky character names like Hazel Flagg and Ann Krausheimer. You feel she never tries to protect herself, insist on showing her best profile. In evening clothes and with key lighting, she’s a knockout, but she’s just as mesmerizing in shorts and boots, flycasting in a fishless pond.
Though she could hold her own in tearjerker territory, Lombard practically invented screwball comedy, or at least shaped its contours. She arrived at the majors from the try-anything Mack Sennett studio, what she called “the most delightful madhouse imaginable.” A natural athlete, she’d been spotted playing baseball by Allan Dwan. She’d actually had her first part at age twelve, but didn’t really sign on until 1925 with Fox Films. She was fielded in the usual smorgasbord of comedies and westerns, but in one of those setbacks with a silver lining, a car accident left a scar on her face, thus thwarting (actually only delaying) her career as a Hollywood dazzler. Mack Sennett didn’t give a damn about facial scars, but he did care about curvaceous bathing beauties who could also indulge in the wildest tomfoolery. By Lombard’s own account, Sennett’s boot camp was the greatest preparation she could have had, a liberating free-for-all that prepared her for the divine silliness of her screwball heroines.
Already something of a contradiction—a well-bred young lady whose background was belied by notoriously blunt talk and salty language—she was a perfect fit for the Sennett MO, which “exposed the sham of pretension, it exploded the petty hypocrisies of people in high places, it flung pies at false dignity,” as she later put it. Her shameless pursuit of William Powell in My Man Godfrey has its roots in Sennett comedies, where she often played a boy-crazy girl.

She was also a perfect fit for the thirties, when verbal acrobatics and fast-talking heroines had displaced the sultry divas of the twenties, that decade of postwar libertinism, contraband booze, flappers, and suffragettes, when movies were as racy as they would ever be, or at least until the sixties when censorship faded. The Depression and the Hays Office ushered in a new conservatism—marriage was sacrosanct, women’s true vocation was wife and mother. The advent of sound had lured some of the wittiest of East Coast writers to Hollywood. Men like Ben Hecht, Robert Riskin, Morrie Ryskind, with wise-guy newspaper or Broadway experience, would circumvent the new prohibitions with delicious innuendo and some of the wittiest dialogue ever to grace the screen. The sexually explicit became sensually implicit, and as avatar mouthpieces for this often rapid-fire dialogue, actors with Voices and razor-sharp timing were in the ascendance.
Lombard was getting her footing in pre-Code movies and is quite believable as a prostitute (no euphemisms used) in Virtue, a proletarian never-trust-a-dame melodrama with Pat O’Brien as her taxi-driver husband. Misunderstandings and a false imprisonment ensue until the movie concludes not with the usual kiss and fadeout of romantic comedy but with a perfect Lombard ending: the exonerated fallen woman pumping gas at a filling station recently acquired by the couple.

The comedy that propelled not only Lombard but Hollywood itself out of the Sturm und Drang of melodrama and into the inspired silliness of the screwball comedy was Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century. That grand showcase in which two hams—Lombard’s lingerie model turned actress and John Barrymore’s Svengali director—go at each other with relentless comic savagery was remarkable for, among other things, the sheer nonstop physicality of Lombard herself. The scissor kicks she levels at the egomaniacal Barrymore in a train compartment were the opening volley of no-holds-barred intramural warfare. Lombard serves notice: from here on in, the screwball heroine would give as good as she got. (Read more.)