How to make a comedy fall flat

 

Judy Holliday, Broderick Crawford and William Holden in Born Yesterday (1950)

This film appeared on a BBC-curated list of the top 100 comedy films of all time. Given that recommendation, perhaps you would expect the film to be full of jokes from end to end. But the humour became rather subdued as the story proceeded, and by the end, few viewers would have called this a comedy. Unless you describe a monster hitting his girlfriend entertaining.

The plot is simple: this is a Pygmalion tale updated to the United States of the 1940s. A fabulously wealthy self-made man is visiting Washington to ensure greater market domination for his business. He is accompanied by his girlfriend, who is the focus of the story.  Like him, she lacks education and social breeding, but unlike him, she cannot even appear to be polite for a moment, and her lack of any experience in upper-class company is wonderfully entertaining as she tries to make conversation with a congressman and his wife. The plot is her partner’s attempt to educate her, a task he delegates to the wonderfully elegant and urbane journalist (William Holden) who has come to interview him.

So far, so good. The couple’s boorish behaviour (they shout at each other, and he mistreats the servants) is initially entertaining. The journalist, Paul Verrall, shows her the sights of Washington: he takes her to museums, to the Capitol, gives her books, and helps her read the daily paper. Suddenly she acquires an enormous dictionary, and starts to read all the papers placed in front of her, and starts to question her relationship with her abusive partner.

With an astonishing tour-de-force interpretation by Judy Holliday, the film could not fail to be funny. But, as mentioned above, the comedy starts to wear thin at this point. The film fails to maintain its light-hearted view of the couple. As Billy Dawn looks more closely at her partner, she doesn’t like what she sees. Nor do we respond very comfortably to a polished journalist trying to teach Billie how to live. She was inferior in her relationship to the bully, and she remains inferior to the journalist, who holds all the trump cards. This is not a relationship that will work, except in film (La-La) land.

The remaining 30 minutes or so are disastrous for the film. Unlike films such as Some Like It Hot, where the comic tone is maintained throughout, despite gangsters killing each other in full view, Born Yesterday feels the need to get sentimental about the American system, and to abandon the comedy to start telling the truth. Except that the American system is described so lovingly, and so falsely:

Paul: The whole history of the world is a story of a struggle between the selfish and the unselfish.

Billie: I can hear you.

Paul: All that's bad around us is bred by selfishness. Sometimes selfishness can even get to be a cause, an organized force, even a government. And then it's called fascism. Can you understand that?

Billie: Sort of.

In any case, the scenes set in the Capitol building have been changed forever by the sight earlier this year (2021) of marauding rioters occupying the Capitol. We don’t believe the lies (did anyone, ever?) told us about the US democratic system, and we feel uncomfortable that this comedy has suddenly turned very serious. So, while we can live with such lines as Billie, discovering herself: 

Billie: I don't know if it's good to find out so much so quick. 

We wince at the complacent, smug attitude that writes off corruption as “one bad apple”.

But, hell, in the end, I can’t deny there are lines in the script that are unforgettable: 

Harry Brock: Listen, cutie, don't get nervous just 'cause you read a book. You're as dumb as you ever were.

Harry is a monster, and the plot doesn't have to lose all the jokes to convince us that he is a monster. If only the plot had remained on this level, we would still be watching the film today. As it is, the tone of the last 20 minutes of the film is simply an embarrassment.