The Good Fairy

#3 in my ranking of William Wyler’s filmography.

I still feel like I’m seeing Lubitsch everywhere. Adapted from a stage play by Ferenc Molnar, The Good Fairy by writer Preston Sturges and director William Wyler has that same sort of pre-Code rambunctiousness that Lubitsch wallowed in so elegantly while also combined with his more mature and emotional works. Throw in the casting of Margaret Sullavan and Frank Morgan (both of whom starred in The Shop Around the Corner several years later) and Herbert Marshall (who starred in Trouble in Paradise and Angel), as well as the Budapest setting, and it just feels unescapable. Lubitsch was always popular with the artists of Hollywood, so I would not be surprised if Sturges and Wyler were as influenced by Lubitsch as by the actual source material. Not to demean the work of the two creatives whose adaptation seems to have been quite loose, for while there are shades of Lubitsch throughout, this is still as much a Sturges/Wyler work as anything else.

Luisa Ginglebusher (Sullavan) lives in a municipal girls’ orphanage in Budapest when the owner of a movie theater comes, wanting a girl who won’t flirt with his customers. Finding Luisa interesting, he hires her (it kind of feels like he buys her, to be honest), and she’s off to work in her silly costume with an electric arrow wand to direct customers back and forth to different sides of the theater. One of these she directs is Detlaff (Reginald Owen), a waiter at one of the fanciest hotels in the city. After he saves her from an aggressive guy on the street after her shift is over, he invites her to take part in a large party at the hotel that he can get her tickets to. She borrows a dress, and is off where she meets the rich industrialist Konrad (Frank Morgan). He’s some kind of scummy, getting Luisa up to a private dining room (unlike in The Merry Widow from the year before, there’s no bed here), and trying to get intimate with her in that safe, Hays Code era sort of way. She gets herself out of the situation, though, by claiming she’s married, pulling a random name from the phone book to give to Konrad since he offers to give her gifts through her husband whom he will employ at a high salary. It’s her good deed as a good fairy.

The joys of the film are the individual moments and the actors playing up their roles. The big set piece of the first third of the film is the scene in the private dining room as Luisa steadily learns the situation she’s in, Konrad gets handsier, and Detlaff tries to rescue her from the situation. It’s an extended bit that just escalates as it keeps going until Luisa gets her way out.

The rest of the film is a further pair of escalations as Konrad shows up to the penniless lawyer Luisa pointed out in the phone book, Dr. Sporum (Herbert Marshall), gives him the job, and Luisa trying to figure out how to save Dr. Sporum from her good deed, something that he might take wrong or not appreciate, making her good deed into a bad one. This, of course, leads to Luisa and Dr. Sporum connecting and falling in love, all while Luisa has come to understand her promise to meet Konrad again and what it means. The little romance that develops between Luisa and Dr. Sporum is delightful as she keeps eliding why she’s even around him while finding ways to spend the money that Konrad gave him as a signing bonus, including a car, a new suit, and, most importantly, a pencil sharpener.

The constant light comedy, almost always built to escalate within scenes (like a minor character, drunk, navigating steps down and then falling up the next flight), is deftly handled by all of the characters involved, especially Frank Morgan, using his broken way of talking to highlight Konrad’s uncomfortable taking on the mantle of a womanizer. However, the comedic highlight really is Owen as the waiter, always feeling a bit drunk but also with a heart of gold while trying to navigate this naïve little girl through a world far more dangerous than she presupposes.

The film also builds towards its ultimate end as the farce that Luisa plays out gets beyond her ability to control until everything has to come to a head. She and Dr. Sporum fall in love. Konrad gets further infatuated with Luisa and won’t let her go. Detlaff increasingly frustrated at the whole situation, especially since he doesn’t really know what is going on leading to a point where he picks Luisa up and runs out of the hotel with her over his shoulder.

I found the comedy absolutely delightful from beginning to end. Wyler manages his actors, the action within the frame, and the editing of the story with the same kind of professional aplomb he’d been developing since he started making cheap, western serials, with a small hiccup in his development with the introduction of sound. He’d taken a few movies to get back on his feet, Counsellor-at-Law showing him fully in command again, if at a small visual scale, but The Good Fairy shows Wyler opening up the scope of his film in the new sound era again. He’s fully in control again, and it works wonderfully.

Much like with Ernst Lubitsch’s films, I can do little more than point and say, “Isn’t it grand?” And that’s true here. Isn’t it grand? It’s delightful, funny, and even touching. It’s wonderfully made, wonderfully acted, and just a wonderful entertainment all around. I loved it completely, and it’s probably my favorite William Wyler so far. And that’s all the more impressive considering movies like The Best Years of Our Lives, Ben-Hur, and The Big Country yet to come.

Rating: 4/4