Remembered for Playing the Title Role in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ Frank Morgan Flexes His Comedic Muscles in ‘The Good Fairy’

The actor Frank Morgan (1890-1949) will be remembered for time and eternity as the great and powerful Oz or, rather, the bumbling but loquacious humbug puttering behind the curtain in Victor Fleming’s “The Wizard of Oz” (1939). Among the reasons the movie holds up and is held dear are its music and spectacle, of course, but the cleverness of the dialogue shouldn’t be overlooked.Consider Oz’s response to the Scarecrow’s singular request: “Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain.”Forget the alliteration about slinking slimy seas: “pusillanimous” is the nub here. As a word to be written, it serves a purpose. Saying it aloud is something else altogether. The joke is that the highflown nature of the adjective points to the bait-and-switch nature of the wizard’s masquerade. W.C. Fields — who was initially pegged to play the title character — would have given “pusillanimous” his own sardonic spin. Bless the bookkeepers at MGM for settling on the more affordable Morgan, a character actor of sharp comedic gifts and a deft way with a line.Morgan is among the quartet of players at the center of William Wyler’s “The Good Fairy” (1935), one of the selections featured in the Paris Theater’s current run of films, “A Century of Romance: Star-Crossed, On The Run and Happily Ever After.” A subcategory to the series is “All’s Fair in Love and Boors: Lubitsch and Sturges,” an indelible array of pictures that includes “Design for Living” (1933), “To Be Or Not To Be” (1942), and “Unfaithfully Yours” (1948).Via the Paris Theater“The Good Fairy” isn’t up to the level of those stunners. Comedy wasn’t exactly in Wyler’s wheelhouse and the origins of the film — the script was adapted by Preston Sturges from a play by a Hungarian author, Ferenc Molnár — are evident in the staginess of the proceedings. Sturges took his cues from Jane Hinton, who had translated Molnar’s “A jó tündér” into English for its Broadway debut, and then spiked the play with his singular mix of the saucy, the cynical, and the sweet.Just how Hungarian is “The Good Fairy?” Although the story ostensibly takes place at Budapest, the trappings are pure Hollywood back lot with intimations of European custom. The plot begins in an orphanage, where we meet the sweet-tempered but mischievous Luisa Ginglebusher (a doe-eyed Margaret Sullavan). After she’s tapped for a job as an usherette by a local theater owner, “Lu” is swept up by events in a big bad world for which she has little grounding.But our Luisa — she’s a quick learner. After leaving work one evening, she’s accosted by the debonair Joe (Cesar Romero), but wiggles out from under his manly attentions by pretending to be the wife of a waiter she met at the theater, Detlaff (Reginald Owen). The latter takes a fatherly shine to the naive young woman and invites her to an aristocratic party at which he’s working. Borrowing an evening gown from her job, Luisa attends the shindig and catches the eye of a meat-packing millionaire, Konrad (Morgan). He’s smitten by the winsome young thing and attempts a seduction. Luisa defers his advances by, again, insisting that she’s married.Who’s the lucky fella this time? Randomly picking a name from the phonebook, Luisa comes up with Dr. Max Sporum (Herbert Marshall), a lawyer of modest means, haughty demeanor, and exacting beard. When all and sundry ultimately cross paths, the deceptions, misunderstandings, and comeuppances are as contrived as you might fear — and all the funnier because of them. Only Sturges could make a pencil sharpener a talisman of sexual attraction or risk throwing away the swiftest of bon mots. Blink your ears and you’ll miss some dillies. The one about the Dutch and the French is particularly good.All of the actors are winning — Marshall has some choice moments in which he flexes his dry continental timbre to indelible effect — but Morgan’s strutting turn as a randy capitalist flustered by circumstance steals the show. Such panache, such joy, such attention paid to intonation and physicality: Morgan is an unsung miracle of cinematic comedy in a film that is no less winning for being conducted in a minor key.

Remembered for Playing the Title Role in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ Frank Morgan Flexes His Comedic Muscles in ‘The Good Fairy’

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