Friday, October 7, 2022

Hal Roach remakes My Man Godfrey

Another of the movies that I recently watched off my DVR is Merrily We Live, which I think got a TCM airing during a Constance Bennett day in Summer Under the Stars. I'd never blogged about it before, which is why I made the point of recording it so I could do a post on it here.

We start off with the hired help, led by Grosvenor the butler (Alan Mowbray), being irritated because all the good silver is missing. That's because the lady of the house, Mrs. Kilbourne (Billie Burke), has had a bad habit of bringing in "forgotten men", not that this movie uses that term the way My Man Godfrey did, and trying to reform them. One of those tramps decided to walk off with as much of the silver as he could carry. So it's going to be a nice surprise for the family when they have their breakfast this morning and have to use whatever utensils are at hand.

In addition to Mom, there's the father (Clarence Kolb) who's big in business and trying to get in with the politicians who hold sway; an adult daughter Geraldine "Jerry" (that's Constance Bennett if you couldn't tell) who is as close to a rational person as you'll find in this family; adult son Kane (Tom Brown) who looks like he's never worked a day in his life; and the stereotypical bratty teenage kid Marion (Bonita Granville), a few years older than the Virginia Weidler character in The Philadelphia Story and not nearly as charming. At least they're all able to convince Mom not to bring in another tramp.

Cut to a winding mountain road that seems to be much too far away from the house where the Kilbournes live for the story to work. Wade Rawlins (Brian Aherne) is driving a jalopy up the road, and stops to get water for the car's radiator, at which point the car rolls backward off a cliff. Rawlins walks down the hill to call for help, and apparently the first house he finds is the Kilbourne place. He tries to ask if he can make a phone call, but Mom is so ditzy that she winds up hiring Rawlins on as a chauffeur before he can explain who he is and what he wants.

Jerry already has a guy pursuing her in the form of Herbert wheeler, but we see that he's pursuing her too fast and how Rawlins has to save her from Wheeler's advances. It's obvious that Jerry is going to fall in love with Rawlins by the end of the movie, although she doesn't know it yet. Meanwhile, Dad is going to be hosting an important dinner, but Marion decides she's going to be a jerk and bollix things by having Rawlins get invited to the dinner when everybody in the family thinks he's a tramp.

Merrily We Live is the sort of screwball comedy that wouldn't have been so bad if it came out two years earlier, before the release of My Man Godfrey, in which case it would be the sort of movie you could look at and see why My Man Godfrey was the better movie. Unfortunately, it came later, so it's hard not to think of producer Hal Roach as ripping off My Man Godfrey. The other problem Hal Roach had is that I don't think he ever really had a particularly big budget to work with. Everything here feels slightly threadbare.

Still, Merrily We Live isn't exactly a bad movie, it's just that there are so many classics of the genre, a standard which Merrily We Live doesn't quite reach.

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