1936 – Carole Lombard
My Man Godfrey
This was a delightful movie with a delightful plot. The actors were all perfectly cast, but if there was one character I couldn’t stand, it would be the female romantic lead, Irene Bullock, played by Carole Lombard. I didn’t like Irene, and I didn’t like the way the movie ended because of the character. And the strange thing about that ending is that the male lead, Godfrey Park, played by William Powell, never showed an ounce of genuine affection for her either.
The character of Irene Bullock was a spoiled woman with the emotional maturity of a two-year-old. She threw wailing, crying temper-tantrums when she didn’t get her own way. She forced her affections on Godfrey, even when he consistently, yet politely, rejected her advances. She was spiteful and vindictive toward her sister, rude and disrespectful to her parents, and woefully and unapologetically out of touch with reality to the point of willful vapidness.
Now granted, that was not Lombard’s fault. It was the way the character was written. But again, I go back to what I’ve said before. An acting nomination is eighty percent actor and twenty percent how the character is written. Lombard played the part as it was written, but I still couldn’t stand the character, and I think I was supposed to like her.
You see, Irene Bullock was supposed to be an emotional roller-coaster. So Lombard had to be deliriously happy one minute and suicidally depressed the next. She had to be screaming and sobbing one moment, and giddily kissing her man the next. She had to be viciously angry one minute, and sweet and cheery the next. But Lombard pulled it off. So did she do a good job? Grudgingly, I have to admit that she did, though I still couldn’t stand the character she created. Personally, I think I would have preferred an ending that would have put Godfrey with Irene’s sister Cornelia, played by Gail Patrick, or better yet, if he’d ended up happily single without either sister. But she blithely invaded his new home, and obliviously ignored his rebuffs. And since there happened to be a judge on hand, she married Godfrey on the spot. But I’m not buying it. Godfrey was smarter than that.