Interloper’s Interlude-William Powell’s “My Man Godfrey” (1936)-A Film Review, Of Sorts

DVD Review

By Special Guest Reviewer Frank Jackman

My Man Godfrey, starring William Powell, Carol Lombard, 1936

You know they don’t make bums, tramps, hoboes like they used to at least back in the day, back in the Great Depression, the world-wide 1930s one, if one is to believe the plotline of the film under review My Man Godfrey. I have been handed. asked for, this assignment since I know, or knew for a relatively short time, the sociology of the outcasts of society, when I myself was on the bum for a while after hitting the skids as a result of military service in Vietnam back in the 1970s. (Although I had my fair share of run-ins and run-downs during that period the real deal expert from that time was my old friend from high school the late Pete Markin, always called “Scribe” in our circles who had his own fair share of problems adjusting to the “real” world after his military service but who wrote an award-winning series of articles for the East Bay Other, I think it was that now long gone publication on the West Coast  although it could have been another alternative newspaper now also long gone The Eye, about a bunch of ex-military guys who couldn’t adjust to the real world and wound up forming some kind of travelling nation community along the railroad tracks and bridges of Southern California.)

In my experience, unlike in the comedic effort in the film under review, the guys, and it was mostly guys since ragamuffin women would be is serious danger in the camps and flop houses I ran into, were not anywhere near nature’s noblemen as portrayed here, especially in the person of Godfrey, maybe better particularly in the  person of Godfrey. They were as likely to steal everything you owned as share anything even shaking DTs booze when a guy was on the hammer (I lost several personal items including cash before I figured out how to store my goods). As likely to con you as speak truth and as likely to sell you out to the nearest copper to save their own necks as not. There is nevertheless a hierarchy among the varieties of outcasts which mainly reflect their relationship to the work ethic from no work on principle to enough day work to keep going.

I learned a lot of this lore running into a guy named Dragon Rocky who was a hobo, the highest rank among the outcasts and recognized as such by one and all along the tracks and under the bridges, who was also, or had also been, it was never clear where he stood on this, a folk song writer and when he was sober a performer at clubs and small concerts on those infrequent days when he wasn’t on the bum.  He was some kind of high figure among the brethren and knew more about how to handle himself in that cutthroat world than any man I met then, or have met now.  So philosopher-king kind heart Godfrey would have gotten no play, would have been skinned alive in real hobo, tramp, bum society.  

But see this guy Godfrey was, if you can believe that anybody sane would do such a thing if for no other reason than to avoid the fleas and coughs, faking it, well maybe not faking it but more like he was on a lark, was trying to find himself or something according to the way he told it to one of his high and mighty friends when he was finally caught out by proper society. See, this Godfrey played by William Powell last seen in this space squiring Myrna Loy around seemingly endlessly in the Dashiell Hammett-inspired The Thin Man film series (that information according to the regular film critic here Sandy Salmon), was an interloper, a man of the upper classes in Boston who had gone to Harvard and decided to become déclassé as they say in sociology, or used to, after having a personal epiphany and rather than dunk his head in the East River down New York City way he became a tramp (no way and Dragon Rocky if he were still alive which is improbable given the dramatically Hobbesian shortened, nasty brutish life along the tracks and embankments.

Fair enough, although hobos, tramps and bums, real ones have little enough room to breathe on the outer edges of society to rightly and righteously resent a guy on a flyer. Grabbing up precious resources better used by real brethren. Not to worry though our man will land on his feet once he gets a job as butler to a screwball bunch of Riverside swells, Mayfair swells, if you want to know who have the social consciousness of amoebas until Godfrey puts them straight, settles their affairs and along the way falls for the family’s younger screwball airhead daughter. Not only that but outduel one Karl Marx in the capitalist-communist battle by saying screw you to the class struggle and on the sly opening up swanky nightclub for those Mayfair swells and providing honorable work for the denizens of the dump which had been their (and Godfrey’s) abode before this act of urban renewal. Hell, talk about paeans to trickle-down economics that one guy much later called “voodoo” economics.  A funny film in spots but don’t take any social message seriously.