The Divine Comedy

Film Forum honors Carole Lombard, cinema's funniest lady.

Just imagine: Several decades before the Frat Pack, Apatovian man-infants and tired bromances dominated big-screen comedy, women were the headlining funny makers. Tina Fey may have revolutionized TV, but those with two X chromosomes have all but vanished from movie comedies, or are relegated to the part of psychic wet nurse. To get a sense of how much celluloid comedy has changed since the golden age of Hollywood—and to witness Fey’s foremother in making humor sexy and smart—there’s no better place to start than Film Forum’s 23-movie tribute to Carole Lombard, one of the funniest geniuses in the history of cinema.

Born 100 years ago in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Lombard is the undisputed queen of screwball comedy, the special subset of laughs that flourished in the 1930s, combining farce, physical comedy and rapid-fire banter. The critic Andrew Sarris once referred to screwball as “sex comedy without the sex.” Significantly, men and women share equal screen time in screwball; while there may be no sex, there’s plenty of sexiness as each gender tries to outwit the other.

Though the fair-haired Lombard is the precursor of blond funny women like Judy Holliday, Marilyn Monroe and even Anna Faris, her persona was never, like that of the silly sisters who followed her, the “dumb blond.” Rather, Lombard specialized in playing the exasperated woman, given to throwing the occasional tantrum. She’s daffy, not dumb. In Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934), the film that made Lombard a major star, she plays aspiring thespian Lily Garland (née Mildred Plotka), opposite John Barrymore as Oscar Jaffe, an overweening theater director–Svengali. Lily goes on to great fame and leaves Broadway for Hollywood; meanwhile, Oscar’s career has plummeted. When the two erstwhile lovers meet on the train of the title, Oscar desperately wants to sign Lily on to his next production (a new version of The Passion Play, no less); what ensues is a battle of wills, egos and language. “We’re not people—we’re lithographs!” the divaish Lily blurts out to the equally ridiculous Oscar. Lombard rolls her eyes, stomps, delivers a series of tiny kicks to Barrymore and makes “phooey” sound like it’s the funniest word in the English language. Barrymore, a stage and screen legend 26 years Lombard’s senior, said of his costar, “She is perhaps the greatest actress I ever worked with.” Director Hawks offered his own praise: “Marvelous girl. Crazy as a bedbug.”

Crazy reaches dizzying heights in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936), perhaps Lombard’s most iconic performance. As high-spirited socialite Irene Bullock, Lombard goes gaga for the titular hobo played by William Powell (her real-life husband from 1931 to ’33). “Can you butle?” she asks Godfrey, hoping he’ll agree to be her family’s butler. Exceptionally moody, Irene either jumps on her bed with glee, shouting, “Godfrey loves me!,” or sulks around her manse at 1011 Fifth Avenue after not getting enough attention from her manservant, proclaiming with faraway eyes, “Life is but an empty bubble.”

While timing, of course, is just about everything in comedy, Lombard’s delivery becomes all the more intoxicating thanks to the beautiful timbre of her voice. At times you can detect the gentlest of vibratos when she speaks, a rich, lustrous sound that pops into a giggle or a breathy “bye.” Lombard says “bye” several times in Ernest Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942). Sadly, this masterful Nazi satire would be the actor’s farewell; she died in a plane crash at the age of 33, less than two months before the film’s release. As she did in Twentieth Century, Lombard plays an actor. But To Be or Not to Be’s Maria Tura, a sleek, stylish star of the Polish stage, refrains from Lily Garland’s outbursts. To outwit the Nazis—and to assuage the concerns of her jealous actor husband (Jack Benny)—Maria relies on withering sarcasm disguised as irresistible flattery, as in this send-off to the Nazi double agent who’s trying to seduce her: “I’m terribly frightened and terribly thrilled. Bye!”

Lombard was loved by many in the film business; Barbara Stanwyck said of her, “[S]he is so alive, modern, frank and natural that she stands out like a beacon on a lightship in this odd place called Hollywood.” What would Lombard make of today’s Hollywood comedies? Perhaps she’d stomp out of the room and say, “Phooey!”—loud enough so that Apatow and associates could hear her.

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