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"An empty room and the right kind of people" is the inmate's definition of the asylum, a tour of the bourgeoisie's padded cells is in order. The transition from the ritzy neon of the credits to an avalanche of Hooverville tin cans is the very quintessence of Hollywood artifice, William Powell in stubble and rags is the quizzical vagabond Shaw wished he'd written about. The suave hobo is a key item in the scavenger hunt held by moneybag-ninnies, battling debutante sisters (Carole Lombard, Gail Patrick) shanghai him from Brooklyn Bridge shantytown to Fifth Avenue marble floors and there he stays, the family's butler and "protégé." The first day of work finds the fluttery society matron (Alice Brady) surrounded by hangover pixies, the patriarch (Eugene Pallette) doing a triple take at the horse in his library, and the mooching gigolo (Mischa Auer) leaping on couches in a dutiful gorilla impression. "Do they go on this way all the time?" "Oh no! This is just a quiet evening." So it goes with Gregory La Cava's carousel, a raucous burlesque with a beautiful still center, a lighter and tarter savior fable than Capra's transmutations of the Gospels. When nitwits and sages try to make sense of the madness, the camera slows down and rests on the kitchen sink for lovely long takes of Powell and Lombard washing dishes and subtly passing from effervescence to melancholy. The "sedulous ape" of aestheticism, Guitry's pearl necklace and Nabokov's forgotten poet, the cold shower that's really a declaration of love: Illumination and humility in the Depression, "one subpoena at a time." Powell's sloshed shuffle, Lombard spinning gleefully in wet satin, Pallette's croaking timbre, these are a few of one's favorite things. Pasolini in Teorema picks up the joke and runs it to its screwball limits. With Jean Dixon, Alan Mowbray, Pat Flaherty, Robert Light, Franklin Pangborn, and Grady Sutton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |