My Man Godfrey

Director: Gregory La Cava

1936 / 94min / 35mm

On the lookout for a “Forgotten Man” to complete a high society scavenger hunt, heiress Alice Bullock (Carole Lombard) scoops up scruffy vagabond William Powell from an East River Hooverville and installs him as butler in the Fifth Avenue manor where she lives with her plutocrat father (bullfrog-voiced Eugene Pallette) and kin in La Cava’s laugh-a-minute lampoon of the idle rich, a downright Shakespearean comedy of confused identity that’s among the most enduring of ’30s screwballs. Not a supporting role is wasted, with standouts including Alice Brady as the scatterbrained matriarch of the Bullock clan and Mischa Auer as her poet protégé “Carlo,” who, per critic Dave Kehr, “assumes the role of the intelligentsia under late capitalism by imitating a gorilla.”

Distributor: Universal