The Criterion Channel is honoring Carole Lombard with one of their latest collections. This curated sample of eleven films illuminates different talents in the Old Hollywood star's repertoire, from her comedic chops to less heralded, though not less excellent, work in melodramas. While she's best remembered as the queen of the screwball genre thanks to films like My Man Godfrey, Lombard was a multifaceted actress whose range deserves to be remembered. While her life was cut short by a tragic plane crash in 1942, the starlet's filmography is a thing of beauty, vast and distinctive, full of treasures to discover and enjoy…
Carole Lombard died at the age of 33 when returning from one of the first Hollywood whistle-stop tours to sell war bonds. Her last film, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, would be released posthumously, making it clear how the actress was at the height of her powers when her sad fate manifested. That famed anti-Nazi comedy is often cited when discussing the legacy of Carole Lombard. It makes sense, for it represents one of her best performances as well as a prime example of the style of comedic acting she helped define, perfect, and popularize. Despite most of her famous movies dating from 1934 onwards, Lombard's career started at the dawn of the 1920s, the heyday of the Silent Era.
When movies were mute, Lombard was often slotted into the role of innocent ingenue whose bad luck puts her in a fair bit of trouble. However, the arrival of talkies changed that, allowing some of the star's off-screen personality to inform her movie work. A consummate prankster with a sailor's foul mouth, Carole Lombard was much more than the clotheshorse her glamorous promo shots might suggest, full of energy and wit. Her move from Fox to Paramount in the early 30s and a short-lived marriage to William Powell further elevated Lombard's public profile. This allowed her to get more varied roles, in search of a fitting star persona.
She hit the jackpot in 1934 when Howard Hawks cast her in Twentieth Century. Encouraging his actress to be more like herself, to act on instinct, the director guided Lombard into a frenzy that'd become her calling card in years to come. The picture codified the tenets of screwball comedy, and Lombard's zaniness became genre-defining. Then, in 1936, the surge in critical and industry acclaim culminated in an Oscar nomination for her turn in My Man Godfrey, playing an eccentric rich girl in love with the family's mysterious butler. Full of bubbly energy, vibrating with manic intensity and firing lines at the speed of light, these roles made Lombard into the First Lady of Screwball and represent what most people think of when seeing her name.
Nonetheless, just as she was more than a glamorous siren in Paramount photo ops, Carole Lombard was more than the manic pixy dream girl par excellence of the 1930s. Some of her best works tap into a talent for evoking melancholy, for unspooling the madness hiding beneath an eccentric façade and complicating stock roles, elevating them to startlingly modern creations. As proof, here are five highlights from the Criterion Channel's Lombard collection:
NO MAN OF HER OWN (1932)
The screen sizzles with sexual tension when Clark Gable and Carole Lombard share a scene. The actress had excellent chemistry with her future second-husband, and this Wesley Ruggles' movie shows that. Somewhere between dizzy comedy and romantic drama, it finds the starlet playing the epitome of the sexy librarian stereotype. Lombard makes dry wit into a seduction tool while also keeping her feet planted on the ground, anchoring the whole film with a down-to-earth attitude. She makes the lightning-fast love affair feel real by centering her portrait around the character's yearning for a less provincial life. Boredom laced with beautiful frustration turns out to be a perfect complement to Hollywood romance.
VIRTUE (1932)
The actress's personal and political beliefs are sometimes called proto-feminist, a quality that could bleed into her films. While Edward Buzzell's Virtue is no pinnacle of social progressivism, there's much to appreciate about its subversion of the fallen woman subgenre. Playing a working girl turned dutiful wife, Lombard gets to be someone who makes no apologies for her past and whose narrative arc isn't defined by redemptive transformation. Indeed, it's the man in the romantic equation that needs to change, to grow less judgmental for the matrimony to work. Often shot through grids and mirrors, Lombard has seldom been more spellbinding, her toughness always tempered by world-weariness, her joy darkened by reticence.
HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE (1935)
Rather than framing screwball romance as a battle of the sexes, director Mitchell Leisen tended to portray his movies' loving couples as pairs of equals searching for joint happiness and willing to compromise to achieve it. This tale of a manicurist and an idle Playboy might be the best evidence of this, allowing the shadows of the Great Depression to encroach on the narrative in significant ways. These lovers tend to put money before romance. Such pragmatism is no match for genuine affection in Tinseltown's fairytales, but Lombard's always sure to give equal importance to the part's inherent sadness as well as its romanticism. Instead of mocking the self-proclaimed gold-digger, Lombard splinters the performance into a kaleidoscope of disappointments. There's a shadow of doubt in the corner of her every smile.
TRUE CONFESSION (1937)
What often made Carole Lombard's most excessive screwball performances work was an underbelly of lunacy she brought to her many queens of silliness. Based upon the French play Mon Crime, True Confession takes this factor to its extreme by casting Lombard in the part of a compulsive liar whose reckless disregard for her own life puts her at risk of the electric chair. This time around, her comedic mania has a dangerous bite, not to mention a charge of marital eroticism. There's nothing like watching Lombard's body vibrate with excitement when riling up her on-screen husband played by Fred MacMurray. Plus, she also gets to fumble in the face of John Barrymore's dipsomaniac lecher – a reunion of comedic titans after the success of Twentieth Century.
VIGIL IN THE NIGHT (1940)
A film proclaiming the nobility of those who dedicate their lives to medicine is very appropriate for our plague-riddled times. Add a blunt screed against the handling of health care as a business, and you might have the perfect movie for 2021. This fairly stiff affair showcases George Stevens' ability to dedramatize melodrama while also asking Lombard to act in a mode of perpetual stoicism, stillness, and resolute righteousness. The role of a British nurse who takes her vocation with dead seriousness is so diametrically opposed to the actress' most famous parts one can't help but be fascinated by her casting, not to mention the performance. Preachy to a fault, the movie's still something every Lombard fan should watch at least once.
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