The Man Who Came to Dinner (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on Turner Classic Movies starting at 7 p.m. yesterday (Thursday, December 21) for two more items in their marathon of Christmas-themed films, The Man Who Came to Dinner and Fitzwilly. The Man Who Came to Dinner was based on a 1939 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart which spoofed legendary lecturer, broadcaster and Algonquin Round Table host Alexander Woollcott – who was so taken with the play and its joking depiction of him that he later acted the lead role of “Sheridan Whiteside” himself in stock company productions. The play deals with Sheridan Whiteside injuring himself in Mesalia, Ohio when he slips and falls down the stairs of the front stoop of the home of the Stanleys. Immobilized and needing a wheelchair for the duration of his stay, he proceeds to take over the Stanleys’ home and lives. Whiteside’s long-suffering secretary, Maggie Cutler, was played by Bette Davis in the film – a real surprise for long-time moviegoers who were used to seeing her in serious roles instead of a rambunctious comedy – and in his introduction TCM host Ben Mankiewicz went on and on about how Davis pressured Warner Bros. production chiefs Jack Warner and Hal Wallis to give her the role, which she wanted desperately. Alas, Mankiewicz (whom I’ve described elsewhere as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) didn’t mention why Davis so desperately wanted the part. When Warner Bros. bought the movie rights, they’d announced that John Barrymore would play Sheridan Whiteside, and Davis had always wanted to work with the great Barrymore. Then Warner and Wallis decided that Barrymore was neither physically nor mentally able to sustain such a big role – Sheridan Whiteside is in almost every scene and bellows his way through reams of dialogue that would have been hard for Barrymore to recite, even with the aid of his notorious cue cards. So at the last minute they replaced him with Monty Woolley, who’d played the part in the original Broadway stage production as well. Not surprisingly, Davis was furious that she’d agreed to play a low-importance role for the opportunity to work with a superstar whom she’d long admired, only to have that snatched from her grasp – though one can see the logic behind Warner’s and Wallis’s decision to yank Barrymore from the film given that he was really on his last legs and would die the following year.

What emerged was a quite sprightly and entertaining film which piles gag on top of gag; Whiteside’s reluctant (to say the least!) hosts are ball-bearing tycoon Ernest Stanley (Grant Mitchell in the comic-exasperation vein that was his stock in trade as a character actor), his wife Daisy (Billie Burke, four years before The Cheaters and playing essentially the same role), and their kids June (Elisabeth Fraser), Richard (Russell Arms) and Harriet (Ruth Vivian). Also in town is a small-time newspaper editor, Bert Jefferson (Richard Travis), who takes a liking to Maggie Cutler and starts courting her and introducing her to the pleasures of small-town life. Bert Jefferson has also written a play, which he shows to Maggie in hopes she can get Sheridan Whiteside to use his influence to get the script to Katharine Cornell (a legendary real-life stage actress who avoided movies like the proverbial plague, though she made one guest appearance in the 1942 film Forever and a Day, playing herself in a war-themed omnibus) and have it produced on Broadway. There’s also a local doctor, Dr. Bradley (George Barbier), who’s written an 800-page autobiography and wants Whiteside to edit it for him and get it published. The habitués from the celebriati who descend on the Stanley home to pay homage to the great Whiteside include unlikely movie star Banjo (Jimmy Durante, overbearing as usual) and even unlikelier actress Lorraine Sheldon (Anne Sheridan, cast way against type and billed second; Davis is first and Woolley third, even though his is the star part). Lorraine is a gold-digging bitch who’s uncertain whether she wants to keep acting or marry the British lord who’s courting her and will keep her in comfort for the rest of his life. Anxious to get rid of Bert Jefferson before he can marry Maggie and deprive him of the secretary who’s been suffering him for 10 years, Whiteside determines to sneak a copy of the play to Lorraine, who will want to shack up with the author for at least three months’ worth of “rewrites” (had my husband Charles been watching this with me, he doubtless would have joked, “Is that what they’re calling it now?”). He also engineers the elopement of Theresa Stanley with the young union organizer from out of town who came to Mesalia to organize the workers in Stanley’s factory – and naturally Ernest Stanley denounces him as a Communist and wants nothing to do with him as a son-in-law.

Also various well-wishers send Whiteside gifts, including an octopus and four penguins, and the penguins successfully escape their cage and run rampant throughout the Whiteside home. And Whiteside not only runs the Stanleys out of their own living room, he forbids them to use their phone because he needs the line for his own calls – and he runs up a huge long-distance bill to people like Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Ultimately Whiteside thinks better of turning Lorraine loose on innocent Bert Jefferson (whose last name I suspect Kaufman and Hard deliberately bestowed on him to make him seem more archetypally “American”), and instead of letting her have her way with him they lock her in an Egyptian mummy case Whiteside has received as a present from the Khedive of Egypt. (I’d always assumed the word “Khedive” was pronounced “Keh-DIVE,” but in this film it’s “Kuh-DEEV.”) It looks like the Stanleys are going to get their house back and no longer have to put up with Whiteside again, only as he’s leaving he stumbles and falls on the same bad stoop of stairs, and … The Man Who Came to Dinner was adapted for the screen by brothers Julius and Philip Epstein (two of the four screenwriters on Casablanca, along with Howard Koch and an uncredited Casey Robinson), and it’s a zany farce staged expertly and at the usual relentless Warners pace by William Keighley (pronounced “Keeley,” by the way; I know that because he took over hosting the Lux Radio Theatre from Cecil B. DeMille and that’s how the announcer of that show introduced him). I’m with Bette Davis in thinking it’s heartbreaking that John Barrymore didn’t get to do this part – Monty Woolley is perfectly fine in the role but Barrymore might have been able to throw in some pathos the way he did in a similar characterization in the 1935 film Twentieth Century – but The Man Who Came to Dinner as it stands is quite charming and intense entertainment even though Keighley either wouldn’t or couldn’t stop Woolley from playing his part as if he were still in a theatre having to boom out all his lines fortissimo to make sure audience members in the farthest seats from the stage could still hear them.