Some time after I became an adult I began to clean. I have become a zealous cleaner, a scrubber of floors, a bleacher, a general enemy of dirt and dust and stains. It is probably unnecessary to say that my mother has cleaned fervently all her life. My husband, who occasionally discovers me in these endeavors — down on my hands and knees in the recesses of some closet — has been known to cry, “Stop!” He takes the long view of order and cleanliness. Why hang up your jacket if you are going to wear it in an hour when you go out? Why empty the ashtray when you can fit in one last cigar butt? Why indeed? I organize and I clean, because I love to see the lines of every object around me clearly delineated, because in my domestic life I fight blur, ambiguity, cyclones, and decay (if not disease). It is a classically feminine position, which is not to say that there aren’t scores of men who find themselves in it. I don’t know if Pangborn is ever seen actually cleaning in a film, but it is not necessary to see him at it. His character is spotless and obsessive, a figure of perfect order. In terms of American mythology, he is a traitor to his sex, an anti-cowboy who has joined the girls. The fun consists in rumpling him, making him sweat and stumble and get dirty.
Sturges, ever alert to the class bias of Americans who nevertheless revel in the excesses of money, makes the western Weenie King the movie’s fairy godfather. The King peels off bills from a bankroll twice the size of his fist and hands them out to the lady of the apartment, whom he discovers hiding in the shower. Pangborn is left in the large living room of the upper-crusty flat, exhausted and appalled at the rigors he is forced to endure in the course of a day’s work, rigors that have left him a little crumpled.
Without western populism and its Weenie Kings, the Franklin Pangborn character could not have the same force. Uppity, pinched, urban, and sissified, he is a figure of prairie prejudices, whose elevated diction and manners are a target of ridicule. In My Man Godfrey we see him for only a few seconds, but those seconds are important. As Depression wish fulfillment, this film remains among the best. Typically, Pang-born plays a fellow attempting to run things in a climate of chaos. One guesses that he is the chairman of the misguided charity committee, which has organized a scavenger hunt for the very rich. Among the “objects” the players have been asked to bring in is “a forgotten man.” Carole Lombard discovers William Powell (Godfrey) in a dump by the river, and after considerable back-and-forth, the daffy but good-hearted creature played by Lombard brings the unshaven, ragged Godfrey into a glittering party of people in gowns and tails. Pangborn tests the forgotten man’s authenticity by seeking permission to feel Godfrey’s whiskers. (Another player has tried to cheat with an imposter.) Pangborn does this with a bow of his head, the words “May I?” and a clearing of the wonderful throat. But it is his gesture that wins my heart. He lifts his fingers and, with a flourish not seen since the eighteenth-century French court, waves a hand in the direction of the beard and declares it real. It is a beautiful moment. In that hand we see both the rigors of politeness, which forbid intimate contact with another’s body, and the distaste for a body that is unwashed, unperfumed, and generally unacceptable. After being declared the genuine article, a truly forgotten man, Godfrey dubs the company around him “a bunch of nitwits,” is hired by Lombard as a butler, and the story begins. I have now lived in New York for twenty years and have wound up from time to time among the nitwits. Although I have never subscribed to the bias of my hometown — that the rich are worse than other people — it is true that vast sums of money have a tendency to look ridiculous from the outside, that the spectacle of spending and playing has a tawdry appearance that turns the stomach of the born-and-bred midwesterner. For a sight of pure silliness and smug self-congratulation, little can compete with the charity ball. They knew this in Hollywood and used it. When my grandparents’ farm was going to ruin in Minnesota, there were city slickers in New York who had managed to hold on to their dough. My Man Godfrey played for audiences in the sticks, too, audiences that feasted on the opulence of the grand New York house while they laughed at the absurdities of those who lived in it. Godfrey is the frog prince of an American fairy tale, a man whose experience of poverty transforms him. Pangborn, on the other hand, defies enchantment. The static being of bureaucratic management, he will never be transformed.
This stasis finds its best expression in W. C. Fields’s The Bank Dick. Pangborn plays the bank examiner, J. Pinkerton Snoopington. In tight black suit, bowler hat, and pince-nez, he is the picture of a stick-in-the-mud. Pangborn’s fate is to be nearly done in by Fields — Egbert Sousé. Fields’s hatred of banks and bankers is well known. And although his aesthetic is anarchic, not agrarian-populist, misanthropic, not humanist, his spleen against bankers must have struck a deep chord among audiences in 1940. It is worth remembering that torturing a bank examiner had greater fantasy value at that time than it does now.
W. C. Fields was not a great champion of women either. He plays a man whose every move is circumscribed by some foolish womanly notion. In Fieldsian myth, marriage, order, codes of behavior, and, above all, temperance are invented by women to fence in the natural man’s appetites. It is notable that as Souse lures his victim, Snoopington, to the Black Pussy Cat Cafe, he asks the bank examiner whether he has noticed Lompoc’s beautiful girls. The examiner harrumphs that he is married and has a grown daughter “eighteen years of age.” In other words, marriage has closed his eyes to other women. The man is no man. Souse, on the other hand, continues muttering under his breath. “That’s how I like ‘em, seventeen, eighteen …” Souse drugs Snoopington with a Mickey Finn in the Black Pussy Cat Cafe, half leads, half carries him to a room in the New Old Lompoc House, then either allows him to fall or pushes him out the window of that new old establishment, hauls the bruised and disheveled examiner up the stairs once again, back into the room, and puts him to bed — all because Snoopingtons sole desire in the world is to examine the books at the bank where Souse and his future son-in-law, Og, have made an “unauthorized” loan.
Even this brief summary reveals the Dickensian spirit of Fields, a comedian whose joy in naming things is as great as his joy in the visual joke. Should we be in doubt as to the source of the filmmaker’s inspiration, the bank examiner assists us. From his sickbed, the prissy Snoopington worries aloud about his wife. “My poor wife,” he moans, “Little Dor-rit.” But, as it turns out, Souse has underestimated the bureaucrat’s willpower. The examiner somehow manages to crawl from his sickbed and arrive at the bank ready for duty. Although he is obviously woozy and a tad unstable on his feet, Snoopington’s pressed suit betrays no sign of his earlier misadventures. The wily Souse conspires to crush Snoopington’s spectacles and render the examiner blind. Souse succeeds in smashing the glasses under his foot, upon which the examiner opens his briefcase. The camera zooms in on a close shot of its contents. The man has five extra pairs of spectacles neatly lined up within. The eyewear tells all. Driven by duty, this man comes prepared. In the finicky realm of ledgers, numbers, and accounts, he has no rival. We know, however, with absolute certainty, that he will live and die a bank examiner. Souse, on the other hand, through mad accident and wild connivance, becomes fabulously wealthy. At the end of the movie he is happily ensconced in his mansion, where his formerly abusive family now dotes on him. Fields makes a contented exit. He is off to the Black Pussy Cat Cafe as of old. His family declares him “a changed man,”