Happy Birthday -- Carole Lombard



Carole Lombard

Yesterday I mistakenly claimed that today is Jean Arthur's, not Carole Lombard's, birthday, which is understandable, considering they both have birthdays this month (Arthur's is on the 17th), but also strangely coincidental because each of them has her rightful claim to the title "Queen of Screwball Comedies" during the 1930s -- although in different ways. Lombard is probably the true queen of screwball comedies, in that more of her films met the criteria set forth by the screwball genre, but Arthur is undoubtedly the queen of "working girl" comedies in the late thirties, and possibly the queen of comic-dramas as well. Plenty of actresses in the thirties, including Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert and Myrna Loy, were skillful comedians, but Lombard and Arthur rose to the top because of their exceedingly unique comedic personas: Lombard was at once glamorous and frenetic, beautiful and sharp-tongued and just as comfortable wearing evening gowns as she was brawling with her male costars; Arthur's appeal is hard to describe to people who have never seen her, but I think the film critic Charles Champlin summed it up best when he said, "Jean Arthur suggested strongly that the ideal woman could be -- ought to be -- judged by her spirit as well as her beauty. ...The notion of the woman as a friend and confidante, as well as someone you courted and were nuts about...became a full-blown possibility as we watched Jean Arthur." Arthur was unique because she seemed so real; Lombard was unique because she seemed almost unreal.

The other major similarity between Lombard and Arthur is that neither had a strong screen presence at the start of her career. Arthur found minor stardom as a silent actress before leaving Hollywood for a few years and then returning to make talkies, and it wasn't until 1935's The Whole Town's Talking that she began to exhibit signs of the "Jean Arthur" we know today. Lombard, meanwhile, is more physically recognizable in her early ingenue roles, but she had a rather boring screen persona until Howard Hawks gave her a chance at comedy in his landmark film Twentieth Century with John Barrymore. The primary difference between Lombard and Arthur (and I'll talk more about Arthur on her birthday) is that while Arthur was extremely shy and reclusive in her everyday life, Lombard's success depended largely on Hawks first allowing her to channel her own personality into her roles. By all accounts, Carole Lombard was an extremely warm, friendly person who also happened to be unflinchingly blunt and swear like a sailor, so some of what we see on screen is simply a heightened version of her true self (minus the swearing, of course). What we don't see on film, but what has been recounted numerous times over the years by her coworkers, was her dedication to equal treatment on the studio lots, to the point that she took all of her meals with the crew (as seen in the picture above) and sat outside with them between takes, rather than retreating to her trailer. She was extremely well-liked among the Hollywood elite, as well as the movie-going public, and if she were alive today, she would be 103 years old.

(pics via here)