I don’t care how many times I see this scene. It still makes me fall apart at the seams. One of the greatest joys of my life was going to the Carole Lombard double-feature at The Film Forum and listening to the rolls and rolls of laughter that kept erupting in the current-day audience throughout this scene. It was a sound like thunder, but not as sharp. More like a wave, relentless waves that kept coming, and coming. People were dying. A current-day supposedly hip audience ROARING with laughter watching this scene. It took us as a group (and the place was sold out) a scene or so to settle down again. I remember my friend Jen, who had never seen the movie, literally writhing about in her chair, screaming with laughter, at the sight of Carlo hanging on the window in the background. And Eugene Pallette, as the baffled straight man in the scene, is almost the funniest thing in it. He just doesn’t know what to do. “Everyone in this family needs to settle down,” he barks. Finally he gives up. “This family doesn’t need any stimulant.” He takes the entire tray of cocktails from Godfrey (the so sexy and so compelling William Powell) and says, “I’ll be in my room. You can repeat this order in 30 minutes.” One of the funniest scenes ever filmed.
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“someday I’m going gorilla hunting and I won’t miss!”
One of my all time favorite lines, this movie never gets old :). Also I love where the mother compares godfrey to the pomerainian. Reminds me of Xmas :)
Carlo is so insufferable, too. “I’m not in the mood.” Oh shut UP, Protege, and just do your gorilla! He is so hilarious!
I love this film!
And as much as I loved Lombard in Twentieth Century, To Be Or Not To Be, and Nothing Sacred, for me this is her definitive performance. Powell, too, was wonderful (as always), as was Mischa Auer, who was a scene-stealer on a regular basis (Destry Rides Again is my favorite of his performances, I think). Also Eugene Pallette, who will always be Friar Tuck, but who played somewhat the same character (to great effect)in this picture as he did in The Lady Eve, was unforgettable (although his descent down the staircase gravel-throating Landlord Fill the Flowing Bowl is hard to beat).
I love how, at the end of the picture when Pallette puts his arm around him to show him the way to the window, Mischa is so delighted by what he perceives as an act of intimacy (there is a kind of innocence attached to Carlo’s corruption).
And remember—you may not like pixies, but that’s no reason to step on them.
Yes, Eugene Pallette is just one of those great dependable character actors – always good, always funny – playing the same part in picture after picture – and you are always happy when they show up. Like, in My Man Godfrey he is the patriarch of a houseful of female lunatics. It’s hysterical! The way he deals with Carlo … he can barely stand his existence.
And how about Gail Patrick? So funny in Love Crazy and others, she’s great here as well.
William Powell is just so SEXY here. From that first entrance in the garbage heap, you’re like: who is that???? No wonder Carole Lombard loses her mind.
Yeah, there was a sort of subversive tone to this film—I was gonna call it an undercurrent, but it’s really more than that, isn’t it?—and Powell exploits it nicely. The several-layers-removed alternate reality of Park Avenue is no match for Powell’s sensuality, symbolized by the ash-pile where Irene discovers him (wherein resides all of Manhattan’s share of Capitalism’s discarded humanness? I’m making this up as I go along, although the screenwriter, Morrie Ryskind, was in the end-throes of a love-affair with Socialism). Powell is one of the most criminally underappreciated actors from Hollywood’s golden age, and while he was always good, seldom did he smolder, as he did in this picture—it is plain to see how and why Irene fell so hard, especially when her options were stiffs like Charlie Van Rumple.
(And yeah, Patrick was terrific, as ever…This is her only role as a real bitch that I know of, though she bordered on it in everything I remember—in Love Crazy, she was totally up for adultery, if you’ll recall, and in My Favorite Wife, while her character’s dilemma was sympathetic, her aversion to his children suggested some deficit in her character; also seem to remember a similar component in Stage Door)