A tribute to f ilm’s La Cava
A Gregory La Cava revival is a worthy task and a challenge
The director of such classics as “My Man Godfrey” and “Stage Door” gets his due.
Who speaks up for Gregory La Cava? Not only that, who has even heard of him anymore?
Once regarded as one of the best of Hollywood’s comedy directors — W.C. Fields waspishly called him the second funniest man in America — La Cava, despite genuine classics “Stage Door” and “My Man Godfrey” to his credit, has been a hard man to restore to prominence. And that is not for lack of trying.
Festivals and repertory programs in this country as well as Europe have been mounting tributes to La Cava for quite some time, with Edinburgh having a crack at it last year, New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2005 and even the Los Angeles County Museum of Art putting on a show here in Los Angeles back in 2001.
Now UCLA’s Film and Television Archive is going to take its shot.
“Our Man Gregory La Cava,” a 14film panorama starting Friday and running through Dec. 18 at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, displays a fine cross-section of the director’s work, illustrating both why these repeated attempts at career refurbishment are worth doing and why the task has been so difficult.
A director with a natural feel for comedy and a gift for helping actors find the humor in a situation, La Cava was that rare studio filmmaker who so valued spontaneity he encouraged his cast to improvise off the script and often filmed the results.
Writing in 1937, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote that “Mr. La Cava really is the only director in the business who deliberately makes up his pictures as he goes along,” a tactic that encouraged a still-visible freshness on screen.
When you combine that technique at its best with La Cava’s penchant for strong female characters, the result was 1937’s “Stage Door.” Screening on Saturday night, this is one of the great backstage sagas, re- warded for its ability to blend comedy and heartache with four Oscar nominations, including for best picture.
By all accounts, the main thing La Cava kept intact from the Broadway play the film is based on is the notion of a group of women living in a theatrical boarding house waiting for their big break. Through observation and improvisation, he molded the characters the key actresses play — from stars Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers to supporting players such as Lucille Ball and Eve Arden — to their personalities. The results, including pioneering use of overlapping dialogue, speak for themselves.
Also on the bill Saturday night is another Rogers starring vehicle, 1939’s “5th Avenue Girl,” which demonstrates another La Cava theme: empathy for the downtrodden. The actress plays a feisty but impoverished young woman who teaches a snooty moneyed family a thing or two about what’s important in life.
La Cava’s social conscience is most famously on display in 1936’s screwball comedy “My Man Godfrey,” which opens the La Cava series Friday night. It stars the ever-urbane William Powell as Godfrey, a resident of a New York City dump who meets Carole Lombard’s goof ball socialite when she arrives looking for a “Forgotten Man” for her upper crust scavenger hunt. Lombard’s family ends up employing Godfrey, who is not all that he seems, as their butler, and, despite rocky patches, that proves to be the wisest hire imaginable.
On the same bill is one of La Cava’s rowdier efforts, 1932 pre-Code “The Half-Naked Truth.” It stars fast-talking Lee Tracy in a role he was born to play, a carnival press agent surrounded by fools who “couldn’t sell a fat boy to a tribe of cannibals.” He heads off to New York with the show’s prime hooch dancer, played by Lupe Vélez, and on arrival is delighted to learn that “this is a bigger sap town than I thought.”
Perhaps because he believed in his ability to create greatness through improvisation, La Cava does not seem to have always been the best judge of material, as the Dec. 9 double-bill of 1933’s “Gallant Lady” and 1935’s “She Married Her Boss” demonstrates.
Both of these films feature expert performances by their female stars. In the first film it’s Ann Harding as a woman who gives her illegitimate son up for adoption and has second thoughts; in the second it’s Claudette Colbert as a crack executive secretary who, well, married her boss. But both feature plot twists and turns so unlikely they almost defy belief.
Also worth looking at is a fine Irene Dunne in 1941’s “Unfinished Business,” which has an unhinged melodramatic plots, and 1932’s preCode “The Age of Consent,” where college girls say things like “I’m not my grandmother, I’m modern, I want to have fun.” Those were the days.
Film historians say La Cava’s career was hampered by his increased use of alcohol, and scenes of inebriation do figure in many of his films. He is a director whose films often worked in fits and starts, but if you pick a winner, pleasure will be your reward.