Carole Lombard’s spectacular repartee in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”

Photo: Carole Lombard in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, 1941. RKO

Carole Lombard had tomboyish qualities, flair for comedy and could hold up her glamour all at the same time like no other actress.

As a twelve-year-old, she appeared in her first film, A Perfect Crime, in 1921, where she played a tomboy who could swing a baseball bat. But it was Howard Hawks who used her effectively for the first time on screen in Twentieth Century, 1934, alongside John Barrymore. Hawks saw her “at a party with a couple of drinks in her and she was hilarious and uninhibited and just what the part needed.” Orson Welles himself recounted in his book-length interviews with Peter Bogdanovic, This Is Orson Welles, that he and Lombard performed many practical jokes. They were pals and tremendous friends.

It is with Lombard, Todd McCarthy writes in the book Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, that Hawks truly began discovering young actresses, shaping their screen personalities and fashioning what became known as “the Hawksian woman”, an independent type with a mind of her own who would stand up to men. He saw something in Lombard (“She was a complete extrovert,” Hawks would recall, “she didn’t say or do anything she didn’t feel she wanted to do, and she was so beautiful and so well dressed that she’d get by with it.”) and trusted to pair her with a well accomplished actor, thus giving her room to free her personality on screen. Just as he would do with other actresses, more notably Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby”, he instinctively knew how to help Lombard be her natural self on screen after a rocky start of the shooting: “Now we’re going back in and make the scene and you kick, and you do any damn thing that comes into your mind that’s natural, and quit acting. If you don’t quit, I’m going to fire you this afternoon.” It worked and “Lombard’s natural spirited quality came through unchecked in her performance”. She is both appealing and self-sufficient, forthright and holding her own with poise and humour in a mad, mad comedy.

Photo: Carole Lombard in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, 1941. RKO

Hawks preferred comedies to dramas, but he didn’t make comedies just for the sake of being funny (on a side note, Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be has often been considered his funniest film because it is his most serious). He pushed comedy forward, and his characters too, he makes his men sometimes heroes and sometimes he demoralizes them, and his women he usually places far superior to men, his stories never driven by commercialism and sentimentality but by a genuine sense of storytelling. He was a storyteller. His worlds, whether in comedies, adventure or noir films, were the creation of a unique artistic vision, a fascinating combination of fantasy and reality, of stylistic intuition and human emotion that can easily fit into our own imagination. There is something about watching a Howard Hawks film that makes me feel good about myself and dream a little.

Carole Lombard went on to team up with William Powell causing a sparkling riot in Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, the definitive screwball comedy, and she brought all her ingeniosity and exuberance to Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be.

Photo: Carole Lombard in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, 1941. RKO

In 1941, Alfred Hitchcock made Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a picture done almost only “as a friendly gesture to Carole Lombard”, he confessed in his interviews with François Truffaut. “She asked whether I’d do a picture with her.” And he did. Although he admitted he really didn’t understand the type of people portrayed in the film, he knew how to emphasize humour, and, luckily for him, he had Lombard’s wonderful comedic timing and “spectacular repartee” to his aid. She could do the most bold, outrageous thing and still not lose the audience. And Hitchcock always had his audience in his mind. Mr. and Mrs. Smith is Hitchcock’s only pure comedy in Hollywood and a pretty good one on its own, a humorous vehicle in which Carole Lombard excelled.

It is a classic story about a married couple who find out after three years together that they aren’t in fact legally married at all. A wild and funny string of events follows, but it is Lombard’s magnetism that wins your full attention whenever she’s on screen. She is a cinematic wonder. She is glamorous and very self-aware, elevated and grounded at the same time, and at the top of her role in a very natural way. She expertly shaves Robert Montgomery and she does it dressed in a pristine pair of satin pajamas. She has the ability to express her feelings just with her face when she and her husband are trying to have dinner at the rundown restaurant from the time when they started dating. She is the personification of innocence when she just nods in agreement when her husband repeatedly asks her if she’s not crossed with him anymore after a bedroom quarrel that has lasted three days. She is all class and grace when she gets soaked wet in a torrential rain in her beautiful black Irene coat. And she is ready to spark when the fuse is lit in the mountain ski lodge where she is delightfully confused about whether to leave or stay. She could do wisecracking, expansive acting and nuanced humour. Even when swathed in silver lamé.

Photo: Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery in “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”, 1941. RKO