George Clooney by Mark Browning

is a further part of screwball, but apart from the humor of Dodge walking out of shot and then popping back, his reaction to hearing Lexie’s plan is a little strange. He confesses while they are in the cabin that he knows what he she is up to but does not warn Carter, a fellow sportsman, apparently a reasonably decent fellow and hardly deserving of Lexie’s scheming. Dodge’s silence is a character action (or inaction) based on the functional needs of structure rather than arising credibly from a character’s motivation.
    Carter is likeable enough but remains more of a handsome, privileged type than an individual. Without more edge to his character (he recounts his war story with a sense of bemusement) or arrogance (perhaps justifiably so given his talent), it is hard to have any strong feelings as a viewer about him, which makes his rivalry with Dodge problematic. We are told from early on, rather than shown, that Carter’s reputation is built on a lie, undermining the possibility of a dramatic revelation. He confesses his wartime tale but Lexie rewards him only by betraying his trust and printing the story (although to have refused would have cost her job and also appear to cave in to pressure from the unscrupulous C.C.). Carter seems closer in age to Lexie, and as a future Harvard law graduate, socially and financially is clearly a much better prospect. When Dodge looks across at Carter and Lexie chatting easily at a nearby table as he negotiates with C.C. or looks back at the pair as they sit behind him on the train, there is interest on Dodge’s part but also an implicit recognition that this match seems entirely natural. A deleted scene in the dining car would have shown Carter describing his rather bloodless regime and all the things he cannot eat and declaring at the end that he is “no fun at all,” but we feel its loss in giving us more direction about his role in the film. He does not create the lie about his wartime record (even if he bears some responsibility for perpetuating it). He does not, as Dodge does, try to push his interest in Lexie beyond what she will accept, walking her to her cabin door like a perfect gentleman. The one thing Carter cannot do is knock insults back and forth. Another line deleted from the dining car scene is Lexie’s answer to Dodge’s question of what C.C. has that he does not. Slowly she lists “money, power, influence” but then after a pause continues, “taste, charisma … intellect,” prompting a spluttering Carter to admit, thumping the table, “You are a loaded pistol.” More cynically, Dodge observes that she is more “like a fox in a henhouse.”
    Clooney might look like a Clark Gable figure (although short of six feet) but he does not have the character of a screwball male. His social and sporting position is eroded (the curfew is arranged on the train as he sleeps, and his calls for a night on the town leave him looking lost and alone, the only one not following the fashion for an ostentatious fur coat) but this is not enough to place him in the role of emasculated hero. In the chase sequence he acts as the dominant hero, thinking up the blocking of the door, the swapping of clothes, and the gag of leaping from the building.
    As a screwball hero, there is a problem in the vagueness of Dodge’s background. As his name suggests, he is evasive when asked at the employment office how he has survived for the last 20 years. He speaks with the eloquence of an educated man, at least in comparison to his fellow players (he draws their attention to “tried and tested methods for diverting the defense from the ball carrier”) but exactly where this comes from or what he did in the war, we can only guess. As Dodge corrects a questioner who asks if he went to college, “Colleg
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” might be seen as a slight echo of Clooney’s own faltering experience with education. A deleted scene in the