A Plea for Eros

foil to the near-deaf Weenie King, a western millionaire in a shabby light-colored overcoat and cowboy hat, who is accompanied by his overdressed wife. As unrefined as he is loaded, the King bangs on the walls of the corridor with his cane and shouts non sequiturs while Pangborn works hard to maintain his dignity in the face of these vulgar high jinks. A Hollywood fantasy of the American West, the Weenie King doesn’t give a damn about form, grammar, deportment, or fences of any kind. Pangborn answers most of the King’s initial questions with the refrain “of course,” interrupted by a telltale clearing of his throat, a tic that recurs in the Pangborn persona. It is as if the sum of his disapproval has lodged itself as a bit of phlegm in his throat. The Weenie King’s wife notices that the apartment is dirty. The manager acknowledges this and apologizes. But the King yells that he likes dirt, that it’s as natural as (among other things) “disease” and “cyclones.” Sturges knows dirt is the bottom line here. Pangborn is nothing if not immaculate.
    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