Gregory La Cava
July 22–August 15, 2005

Hailed by W. C. Fields as "the second funniest man in America," Gregory La Cava (1892–1952) was responsible for some of the most caustic screwball comedies and political satires of the Great Depression. This comprehensive retrospective features the writer-director’s pioneering animation and nearly all his surviving fiction films, which combine wit and pathos in startling measure. La Cava’s depictions of class warfare and sexual subversion are populated by a rogue’s gallery of fast-talking, pie-eyed schemers. His treatment of prostitution, mental illness, and immigrant life was ahead of its time. So was his peculiar sort of feminism: his male characters tend to be shameless, boorish, or spineless, while his women, even the gold diggers and dipsomaniacs, are far more cunning and strong-willed, discovering that they can have it all: careers, affairs, and female companionship. A hard-drinking iconoclast (alcohol was the ruin of him), La Cava demanded full autonomy from studio heads and seldom used a prepared script, instead inventing ingenious gags, dialogue, and plot turns while in the thick of production. Actors like Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and William Powell thrilled to the prospect of working without a net, and gave him the performances of their careers.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Media. Special thanks to Warner Bros., The Library of Congress, George Eastman House, MCA/Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Columbia Pictures Repertory, bfi National Film and Television Archive, and the Cinémathèque Québécoise for the loan of prints.

*Denotes silent film with piano accompaniment by Ben Model, Stuart Oderman, Donald Sosin, or Jon Spurney, as noted.

Bed of Roses. 1933. USA. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, La Cava, Eugene Thackery. With Constance Bennett, Joel McCrea. Just released from prison and hard up for cash, a couple of wisecracking dames seduce and rob unwitting dupes, plying them with alcohol and even accusing them of rape. With its quicksilver turns from scathing satire to dark melodrama, this astonishing pre-Code film is as ruthless a portrait of sex and class as has ever appeared in American cinema. 67 min.
Friday, July 22, 6:00. T1; Monday, August 15, 8:15. T2

Stage Door. 1937. USA. Screenplay by Morrie Ryskind, Anthony Veiller, La Cava. With Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn. Set in a New York boardinghouse for aspiring young actresses, Stage Door pits the plebeian Rogers against her frosty patrician roommate, Hepburn. Rapid-fire dialogue, pathos, and nuanced characterization make this feminist masterpiece superior to the Edna Ferber-George S. Kaufman play on which it is based. 92 min.
Friday, July 22, 8:00; Saturday, July 30, 4:00. T1

So’s Your Old Man. 1926. USA. Screenplay by J. Clarkson Miller, Howard Emmett Rogers. With W. C. Fields, Alice Joyce, Charles Rogers. An old souse (Fields) invents an unbreakable auto glass that promises to make him a fortune, but things inevitably
go awry. Only after he befriends a lovely Spanish princess and impresses her with his golf game will all be right and well again. 67 min.
Saturday, July 23, 2:00 (*Model); Sunday, July 31, 3:00 (*Sosin). T1

Running Wild. 1927. USA. Screenplay by La Cava. With W. C. Fields, Mary Brian. In this hilarious slapstick comedy, Fields plays the henpecked Elmer Finch, who lives in terror of his shrewish wife, his fat stepson, his overbearing boss, and his dogs. Through a string of madcap adventures, he is hypnotized into believing he is a lion, and tries to undo twenty years of being browbeaten. 68 min.
Saturday, July 23, 4:00 (*Model); Sunday, July 31, 5:00 (*Sosin). T1

Gabriel over the White House. 1933. USA. Screenplay by Carey Wilson, Bertram Bloch. With Walter Huston, Franchot Tone. Surely the most crackpot and disturbing of Depression-era Hollywood fantasies, La Cava’s first commercial hit stars Huston as President Judson Hammond, a party puppet more preoccupied with his mistress than with the country’s rampant unemployment, racketeering, and mounting threat of war. An accident engineered by the Archangel Gabriel transforms him into a “benevolent” (some would say fascistic) dictator. 86 min.
Saturday, July 23, 6:00. T1; Thursday, August 4, 6:00. T2

My Man Godfrey. 1936. USA. Screenplay by Morrie Ryskind, Eric Hatch. With William Powell, Carole Lombard. Played with insouciant verve by Powell, Godfrey Parke stands for every "forgotten man" of the Great Depression who harbored dreams of bringing the rich to their knees before setting them on a path of moral righteousness. A cruel streak runs through the film’s madcap zaniness; never before—or since—has America’s privileged set been portrayed as such shrill, alcoholic nitwits. 94 min.
Saturday, July 23, 8:00; Monday August 1, 7:30. T1

Gregory La Cava: Animation Program 1
As head of William Randolph Hearst Enterprises, La Cava was responsible for animating and directing the cartoon versions of popular comic strips of the day, including "Krazy Kat" and "The Katzenjammer Kids." Program 1 features Cartoons on the Beach (1915), Cartoons in a Seminary (1915), and eight cartoons written by George Herriman, including Krazy Kat Goes A-Wooing (1916) and Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse at the Circus (1916). Approx. 60 min.
Sunday, July 24, 1:00 (*Model). T1; Saturday, August 13, 4:30 (*Oderman). T2

Laugh and Get Rich. 1931. USA. Screenplay by Douglas MacLean, La Cava, Ralph Spence. With Edna May Oliver, Hugh Herbert. A Depression-era comedy of manners about a bumbling husband who fancies himself a shrewd entrepreneur, and his waspish wife, played with priceless indignation by the irrepressible Oliver, who meddles in the affairs of the tenants in their rundown boardinghouse. 72 min.
Sunday, July 24, 3:00; Monday, July 25, 8:00. T1

The Half-Naked Truth. 1932. USA. Screenplay by Bartlett McCormack, Corey Ford, La Cava, Ben Markson, H. N. Swanson. With Lupe Velez, Lee Tracy. A confidence man stages a pub-licity stunt to catapult a mediocre circus dancer to Broadway stardom. Velez’s outlandishly lewd bump-and-grind performance is a precursor to Jayne Mansfield’s bodacious moves in Frank Tashlin’s 1950s sex comedies. 77 min.
Sunday, July 24, 5:00; Wednesday, July 27, 8:00. T1

Gregory La Cava: Animation Program 2
In addition to writing gags, La Cava oversaw brilliant artists like Raoul Barre, Grim Natwick (future creator of "Betty Boop"), and Walter Lantz (future creator of "Woody Woodpecker"), revolutionizing character animation with a greater emphasis on shape-shifting, gravity-defying movements. Program 2 features La Cava’s political cartoons, and includes Der Captain Is Examined for Insurance (1917), Policy and Pie (1918), The Breath of a Nation (1919), and Smokey Smokes (1920). Program approx. 60 min.
Monday, July 25, 6:00 (*Model). T1; Sunday, August 14, 2:00 (*Oderman). T2

Big News. 1929. USA. Screenplay by Jack Jungmeyer, Walter DeLeon, Frank Reicher. With Robert Armstrong, Carole Lombard. A reporter is on the skids, having been fired from his job and threatened with divorce. While secretly investigating a hot lead—a dope ring run by the owner of a speakeasy—he gets mixed up in the murder of a newspaper editor. Approx. 70 min.
Thursday, July 28, 6:00; Saturday, July 30, 2:00. T1

Smart Woman. 1931. USA. Screenplay by Salisbury Field. With Mary Astor, Robert Ames, Edward Everett Horton. In La Cava’s wry, cynical look at sexual politics and marital strife, Astor plays a shrewd wife who gives her philandering husband a taste of his own medicine, organizing a weekend with his mistress, his mistress’s mother, and a raffish English lord who provokes fits of jealousy. 68 min.
Thursday, July 28, 7:30. T1

She Married Her Boss. 1935. USA. Screenplay by Sydney Buchman, Thyra Samter Winslow. With Claudette Colbert, Melvyn Douglas, Jean Dixon. A smart farce that anticipates the Doris Day–Rock Hudson comedies of the 1950s, with Colbert playing a romantic, headstrong secretary who weds her rich boss, the sullen owner of a New York City department store, inheriting his snobbish family in the bargain. 91 min.
Friday, July 29, 6:00. T1; Wednesday, August 3, 8:00. T2

Private Worlds. 1935. USA. Screenplay by Phyllis Bottome, La Cava, Lynn Starling. With Claudette Colbert, Charles Boyer, Joel McCrea. One of the first Hollywood pictures to portray the subject of mental illness in a serious manner. Colbert and McCrea are doctors who minister to their patients with kindness, thereby running afoul of Boyer, a misogynistic French superintendent with a secret past. 84 min.
Friday, July 29, 8:00. T1; Wednesday, August 3, 6:00. T2

Fifth Avenue Girl. 1939. USA. Screenplay by Allan Scott, La Cava, Morrie Ryskind. With Ginger Rogers, Tim Holt, Walter Connolly. La Cava’s mordant wit and pitch-perfect ear for upper-crust dialogue make Fifth Avenue Girl a beguiling variant of My Man Godfrey, with Rogers as a homeless girl bribed by a millionaire to pose as a gold digger, in order to shake up his spoiled, complacent family. 83 min.
Saturday, July 30, 6:00 (T1); Friday, August 5, 6:00 (T2)

Primrose Path. 1940. USA. Screenplay by La Cava, Allan Scott. With Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea, Miles Mander. Daring for its time, Primrose Path treats the subject of prostitution with great sensitivity, with Rogers giving a remarkably restrained performance as a girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Critic Richard Roud described La Cava’s location work in a Cannery Row shantytown district as approaching the look of Italian neorealism. 93 min.
Saturday, July 30, 8:00. T1; Friday, August 5, 8:00. T2

The Age of Consent. 1932. USA. Screenplay by Sarah Y. Mason, Francis Cockrell, H. N. Swanson. With Dorothy Wilson, John Halliday. With shades of Scott Fitzgerald, this pre-Code melodrama charts the reckless lives of a college sophomore and his fiancée, who are doomed to failure after the young man drunkenly beds another woman. Wild dance parties, automobile accidents, free love, and teen sex are the film’s Jazz Age undercurrents. 63 min.
Monday, August 1, 6:00. T1; Sunday, August 7, 2:00. T2

A Symphony of Six Million. 1932. USA. Screenplay by Bernard Schubert, J. Walter Ruben, James Seymour. With Ricardo Cortez, Irene Dunne, Gregory Ratoff. Based on a tearjerker by Fannie Hurst, this genuinely affecting melodrama follows a young Jewish surgeon’s rise from the Lower East Side slums to a lucrative Park Avenue practice catering to rich, hypochondriacal women. Only his childhood sweetheart, a poor handicapped girl played by the lovely Dunne, can reawaken his idealism. 94 min.
Thursday, August 4, 8:00. T2

His Nibs. 1921. USA. With Charles Sale, Colleen Moore, Harry Edwards. La Cava’s droll first feature is set in the Slippery Elm Picture Palace, an old-time movie house in a small American town. Known for his country bumpkin routines, actor “Chic” Sale plays seven roles, including the projectionist, woman organist, vaudeville performer, newspaper reporter, and local weather prophet. Approx. 60 min.
Saturday, August 6, 2:00 (*Spurney); Monday, August 8, 8:00 (*Spurney). T2

Let’s Get Married. 1926. USA. Screenplay by John Bishop, J. Clarkson Miller, Luther Reed. With Richard Dix, Lois Wilson, Edna May Oliver. A farcical comedy starring Dix as a brawler who is forever landing in prison on Blackwell’s Island. His sweetheart (Wilson) thinks he’s on a missionary tour of the South Seas, and an uproarious Oliver plays a lush who tries to sell him hymnals. Approx. 50 min.
Saturday, August 6, 4:00 (*Spurney); Monday, August 8, 6:00 (*Spurney). T2

Womanhandled. 1925. USA. Screenplay by Luther Reed, Arthur Stringer. With Richard Dix, Esther Ralston. Society playboy Dix must prove he is not the sort of “womanhandled” East Coast man that the beautiful Ralston despises. He heads out West to become the strong, silent type, only to discover that all the real cowboys have gone Hollywood. Approx. 60 min.
Saturday, August 6, 6:00 (*Spurney); Thursday, August 11, 8:00 (*Spurney). T2

The Affairs of Cellini. 1934. USA. Screenplay by Edwin Justus Mayer, Bess Meredyth. With Constance Bennett, Fredric March, Frank Morgan. A delicious bedroom farce set in Renaissance Florence, starring March as the famed swashbuckling goldsmith and sculptor Cellini, who gets into a romantic entanglement with the overly libidinous Duke and Duchess de Medici, as well as with his own model, the delightfully dense Fay Wray. 90 min.
Saturday, August 6, 8:00; Thursday, August 11, 6:00. T2

What Every Woman Knows. 1934. USA. Screenplay by Monckton Hoffe, John Meehan, James Kevin McGuinness. With Helen Hayes, Brian Aherne. A gorgeously acted adaptation of the J. M. Barrie play, with Hayes reprising her Broadway stage performance as the twenty-six-year-old Maggie Wylie, a selfless woman who lives a spinster’s life until she is married off to an ambitious young man. Cleverer than those around her, she helps the lowborn Scot to become a successful member of British Parliament. 92 min.
Sunday, August 7, 5:00; Friday, August 12, 5:30. T2

Unfinished Business. 1941. USA. Screenplay by Eugene Thackrey. With Irene Dunne, Robert Montgomery, Preston Foster. The always touching Dunne plays an Ohio music teacher who seeks fame in New York as an opera singer but gets sidetracked by her divided affections for a rich hedonist and his charming brother. Dunne’s onscreen vacillations are all the more convincing because La Cava didn’t settle on the film’s outcome until well into production. 95 min.
Wednesday, August 10, 6:00; Saturday, August 13, 6:30. T2

Lady in a Jam. 1942. USA. Screenplay by Francis M. Cockrell, Otho Lovering, Eugene Thackrey. With Irene Dunne, Patric Knowles, Ralph Bellamy. Dunne is a screwball socialite convinced that true happiness can come only by marrying her shrink. Billed as the most expensive comedy ever made, Lady in a Jam was (undeservedly) a commercial and critical flop from which La Cava never recovered. 83 min.
Wednesday, August 10, 8:00; Saturday, August 13, 8:30. T2

Gallant Lady. 1934. Directed by Gregory La Cava. With Ann Harding, Clive Brook. A melodrama about an unwed mother giving up her baby for adoption. "While shooting Gallant Lady, one of Ann Harding's aptly named paeans to the cause of genteel martyrdom, La Cava decided that the assigned script was a hopeless botch and proceeded to shoot more or less from scratch on the set" (Stephen Harvey). 86 min.

Friday, August 12, 7:30. T2

Feel My Pulse. 1928. USA. Screenplay by Nicholas T. Barrows, George Marion, Jr. With Bebe Daniels, William Powell. A hypochondriacal heiress inherits an island sanitarium, only to discover that it doubles as the hideaway of a bootlegger. La Cava’s hysterical comedy is filled with sterling performances and ingenious gags, including a slow-motion sequence involving rumrunners high on chloroform. 86 min.
Friday, August 12, 9:00 (*Spurney); Sunday, August 14, 5:00 (*Spurney). T2

Living in a Big Way. 1947. USA. Screenplay by La Cava, Irving Ravetch. With Gene Kelly, Marie McDonald. A G.I. returns from the front to find that his darling war bride is actually a spoiled heiress eager to divorce him. La Cava’s swan song fared poorly on release but deserves reconsideration, with two first-rate musical sequences directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen. 104 min.
Saturday, August 13, 2:00; Monday, August 15, 6:00. T2

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