COMEDY PAR EXCELLENCE

Evening Star, Issue 22572, 13 February 1937, Page 13

COMEDY PAR EXCELLENCE

‘ GODFREY' COMES TO EMPIRE “ Have the following on the set tomorrow morning, 'J o’clock . . . one nanny goat witu kid, 10,000 tin cans, one police call box, one horse radish mill, one 1880 bustle, one cuckoo clock, and one ‘ forgotten man.’ —(.Signed; Gregory La Cava.” These arc just a few of tlie conglomerated properties that the prop man had to supply for Universal’s ‘ My Man Godfrey,’ which opens at the Empire on Friday, starring William Rowell and Carole Lombard. The above-mentioned oddments and remainders are needed for tho Scavenger Hunt in the picture, which begins at the palatial Waldorf Hotel and sweeps out to the city dump and back again, Of tremendous contrast arc these two settings that mark the opening sequences in tho production. The hotel ball room, where one of the film’s most humorous and exciting episodes takes place, has composite walls which look like marble, but absorb sound. Echoes are thus prevented, since they would jumble the spoken lines. The sweeping beauty of the ball room accentuates the georgeous gowns of the lovely women on the set. It serves all the more to emphasise the lowly estate of the “ forgotten man.” Carole Lombard visits the city dump to discover such a man, in order to will the hunt. She finds him, in the person of William Powell, amid three acres of refuse. Universal had to construct the place, piling up tin cans, old auto parts, broken bottles and boxes, dilapidated baby carriages, stone fragments, and tattered clothes. There a millionaire debutante stands alongside of a battered man, surrounded' by the desolate discard of civilisation. Other settings in the production include tho homo of the debutante, a mansion of tho rich, where tho girl brings her newly-discovered companion, installing him as butler. Against that background is unfolded the comedy of the tale, which Eric Hatch created first as a novel and later wrote as a screen play with Monri© Ryskind.