The Man Who Came To Dinner – George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, 1939 ★★½

Rudeness Is Its Own Reward

Let no one claim the class system was confined to other parts of the world: The Man Who Came To Dinner shows it in full effect here in America. A media celebrity takes over the house of an Ohio family, throwing them into chaos. But who are we encouraged to care about? The elitist celeb who sneers at the family’s backward ways.

A successful screwball comedy by the team of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, The Man Who Came To Dinner was a long-running hit on Broadway and a popular movie starring Monty Woolley and Bette Davis. Unlike their even bigger earlier comedy, You Can’t Take It With You, this offers an inventive plot, some wicked one-liners, and a lead character right out of Falstaff.

But as the play rolls along, it plays up the patrician sensibilities of its authors in a smug, hard-to-take way. Kaufman and Hart seem to think if they enjoy rubbing elbows with the like of Noel Coward and Harpo Marx, so should you. Meanwhile, if you are like me, you may find a little of Sheridan Whiteside winds up more than enough.

Having slipped on some ice on the Stanley porch while paying a brief call, Whiteside finds himself confined to their home. Now he plans to sue the Stanleys for the interruption of his livelihood. “Is there a man in the world who suffers as I do from the gross inadequacies of the human race!” he exclaims early in the play, after demanding that the Stanley family vacate the first floor of their home for his personal use.

Sheridan Whiteside (Jim Beaver) is confronted by the Stanleys (Doug Haverty and Laura Wolfe) after he occupies their lower floor in a 2019 production at the Lonny Chapman Theatre in Los Angeles. Note the Christmas decoration; though this is a Yuletide show in the same way as Die Hard.
Photo by Doug Engalla from https://stageandcinema.com/2019/12/28/man-who-came-to-dinner/

Mr. Stanley is upset by the brusque stranger’s intrusion; his wife is more excited about the national hubbub surrounding her home.

MRS. STANLEY (wild-eyed): H. G. Wells? On our telephone?

Much later, Whiteside discovers his hip isn’t broken, but by then he is enjoying himself too much to leave his wheelchair and Ohio and get back to his pre-jet-set life. You might expect this to factor in the play; yet Whiteside never gets called to account for his deception. Instead, you are expected to be amused by how well everything works out for him.

Much of the comedy centers on Whiteside’s constant irascibility, a joke that just avoids getting stale with fresh doses of invective:

JUNE (hesitating): Mr. Whiteside, he’s – he’s a very sensitive boy. You will be nice to him, won’t you?

WHITESIDE: God damn it, June, when will you learn that I am always kind and courteous! Bring this idiot in!

Monty Woolley in the 1942 movie adaptation of The Man Who Came To Dinner. It is Woolley's most famous role; he also played Whiteside in the original Broadway play. Woolley was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar that same year, but for another movie.
Image from https://reelclub.wordpress.com/2012/12/16/a-killer-christmas-elements-of-black-comedy-in-the-man-who-came-to-dinner/

Like You Can’t Take It With You, the play is packed with nutty characters, both residents of Mesalia, Ohio and the many bicoastal elites who call on Whiteside. A doctor keeps badgering Whiteside, a prominent critic, to read his obviously dull memoir. Mr. Stanley’s sister harbors a strange secret. One neighbor tries to endear herself to the guest by bringing him a jar of calf’s foot jelly.

Whiteside’s secretary Maggie falls in love with a local newspaper editor, Bert Jefferson, which has her dreaming about becoming a housewife and injects a wan romantic subplot. Whiteside counters by inviting over glamorous screen siren Lorraine Sheldon to sic on the scribe. Lorraine is at present chasing a British lord, but one look at the handsome Jefferson is enough to put her on a new scent.

Lorraine’s reputation for sleeping her way to the top earns her a lot of digs, including from Banjo, the play’s Harpo stand-in:

BANJO: How’s the mattress business, Lorraine?

LORRAINE: Very funny. It’s too bad, Banjo, that your pictures aren’t as funny as you seem to think you are.

Orson Welles is said to have claimed (with dubious veracity) that he was in consideration to play Whiteside for the original Broadway show. In 1972, he took on the role in a modernized TV production, here playing opposite Joan Collins as Lorraine Sheldon.
Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0273773/

Lorraine’s intrusion into her love life naturally upsets Maggie, and for a time triggers a serious schism with Whiteside. For his part, he claims he is saving Maggie from a life of obscure Midwestern drudgery. But she sees through that: “I think you are a selfish, petty egomaniac who would see his mother burned at the stake if that was the only way he could light his cigarette.”

The play is quite dated in its many references to famous radio and Tinseltown celebrities of yore. Katharine Cornell, a legendary actress and producer, is mentioned prominently, as is Walt Disney, Felix Frankfurter, Louella Parsons, Sam Goldwyn and many other limelighters of the era. A modern staging, of which there have been many, would likely revise the persistent name-dropping or else drop it altogether.

At the same time, there is a playful time-capsule aspect to how the play channels America in the 1930s. Whiteside’s job as a radio commentator has him performing a Christmas show patched through to America from the Stanley living room. When he is not busy overseeing the script, he enjoys the company of a boxed colony of cockroaches sent over by an entomologist friend, or, as part of his sideline as a criminal rehabilitator, hosts for dinner a group of convicts with murderous pasts.

Alexander Woollcott (at left) compares physiques with his friend Harpo Marx. Both men are represented in The Man Who Came To Dinner, Harpo in the form of the trickster 'Banjo' who helps Whiteside resolve a late-act crisis.
Image from https://longreads.com/2014/04/30/the-odd-couple-alexander-woollcott-and-harpo-our-longreads-member-pick/ 

This pushes the Stanley patriarch past his breaking point:

MRS. STANLEY: Now, Ernest –

STANLEY (waving her away): I come home to find convicts sitting at my dinner table – butcher-shop murderers. A man putting cockroaches in the kitchen.

MRS. STANLEY: They just escaped, Ernest.

STANLEY: That’s not the point. I don’t like coming home to find twenty-two Chinese students using my bathroom. I tell you I won’t stand for it, no matter who you are.

All this makes for a decent-enough comedy, but like other Kaufman and Hart plays, lacks a deeper sense of humanity. Kaufman cut his teeth with the Marx Brothers and wasn’t pausing for anyone’s feelings any more than he did for Margaret Dumont. The Stanleys’ plight throughout is played for laughs, without a hint of empathy or rooting interest.

The staging for a 2013 Arizona Repertory Theatre production plays up the sedate luxury of the Stanley home, the better to set up Whiteside's complaints of being stuck in "a moldy mortuary."
Photo by Deanna Fitzgerald from https://deannafitzgerald.myportfolio.com/the-man-who-came-to-dinner

In one extended subplot, Whiteside even encourages the starstruck Stanley children to run away from home.

WHITESIDE: Look at me. I left home at the age of four and haven’t been back since. They hear me on the radio and that’s enough for them.

One wonders when Whiteside’s brusque manner will lead to some comeuppance, but the writers are content to let him hurl insults and take advantage of his social lessers. I can’t deny the results are intermittently pretty funny; this is a decent screwball farce much of the way. Whiteside is a jolting comic character, to be sure. Yet the absence of basic human sympathy is frustrating. With Kaufman and Hart, you get the feeling only Whiteside’s secretary has feelings worth respecting.

Whiteside was based on Alexander Woollcott, a cultural commentator and member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. Woollcott collaborated with Kaufman on at least a couple Broadway plays and once moved into Hart’s home, which in turn inspired the play. The play is dedicated to Woollcott, and while it plays up Whiteside’s blustery obnoxiousness, he is presented with respect throughout.

That may be what the problem is for me. If anyone needed to be taken down a peg, it was Sheridan Whiteside. Yet The Man Who Came To Dinner is too delighted by his company to put him through any serious discomfort. The result makes for a screwball that’s lands a bit flat.