Jean Arthur is a writer for the Boy’s Constant Companion.
No, Jean Arthur is an actress, and in the movie Easy Living she plays a writer for the Boy’s Constant Companion, but let’s not get bogged down in such hairsplitting. In any event, she barely holds that job and is fired early in the film. It wasn’t much of a job anyway–the harridan spinsters who policed that magazine must have been insufferable coworkers.
But it paid the rent. Well, no it didn’t–she’s behind in her $7 a week rent when we first meet her, and has only a single dime for her bus fare, so it’s not like the job was some fabulous boondoggle. But things are tough all over–haven’t you heard there’s a Depression on? Of course, if times are so tough, how to explain the fur coat that just dropped out of the sky onto her head?
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The good girl thing to do would be to return it. Being a good girl, this is what she does–a dutiful door-to-door tour to find the owner of the prodigal sable. Unaccountably, she finds the rightful owner and it turns out to be her! Or, more precisely, she finds the man who bought the coat and who threw it from his roof, and he insists it’s now hers. So… huh.
It’s not a total win, though. It crushed her hat, and prompted her to get off the bus early, so she’s up one fur coat but down a hat and a bus ride. The rich man agrees to make it up to her–his chauffeur will drive her to work, with a detour on the way to a hat shop so he can buy her the most expensive, fabulous chapeau on offer–something to go with her new coat.
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Problem is, now she’s up a fur coat, a hat, and a ride to work but down a job. That’s because the harridan spinsters (I did mention them, right?) see her richy new wardrobe and assume the only way some strange man would buy her all that nice stuff was if he was getting something (or rather, getting some) in return. And since that kind of behavior isn’t compatible with the moral character of this upstanding Christian magazine, she’s out.
Of course it’s here that everything goes all wonky. Within 48 hours she will be living a life of unimaginable luxury, wealthy and famous, with a loving husband, a powerful benefactor, and everything she’s ever wanted–all because of the same assumptions that led the harridan spinsters to reject her. One by one, everyone she meets draws the same insulting conclusion about what she’s done to get that coat–and then, for their own selfish calculations, proceed to reward her in new ways.
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It’s Pretty Woman in reverse–the good girl, wrongly mistaken for a mistress, who isn’t slut-shamed for it, but rewarded.
In other words, what we have here is a film more daring, gutsy, and unpredictable than its age would suggest. For a 1937 screwball farce, this is racy stuff–and convinced it can barrel over any censorial objections through sheer moxie. Which, yes, it could and it did.
But the key words out of the 500 or so words you’ve just read is the phrase “of course” a couple of paragraphs up. Because of course this film is a daring, brilliant, hilarious act of moxie–just check out the credits.
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And no, I don’t mean stars Jean Arthur and Ray Milland. They’re excellent, but that’s not where I want to draw your attention. Nor is it director Mitchell Leisen–then at the apex of his Hollywood career and the closest he’d ever come to being called a comedy genius, but not the man of the hour here. No, I mean the real comedy genius, the one who is truly responsible for this bubbly gem–writer Preston Sturges.
Sturges was not yet a name–he hadn’t directed a film, and sat on the sidelines burning with jealousy as he watched Leisen. At this point in his career, Preston was a gun for hire–and he’d been hired to turn an existing story by Vera Caspary into a screenplay. Sturges was unimpressed by Caspary’s story–some nonsense about a poor girl who steals a fur coat, gets into some farcical situations thanks to the mistaken identities triggered by her new wardrobe, and is eventually judged and punished for her transgressions. Where’s the fun in that?
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So, jettisoning nearly everything save for the title and the idea of a poor girl wearing an expensive fur coat, he built up something entirely else–a glorious infrastructure of slapstick and sex and glamor and wish fulfillment and romance and wordplay and always breathless pace. Word started to get around Hollywood that Sturges’ script was a crackerjack, a comic masterpiece. It wasn’t yet enough to win him the directing job he so longed for, but close… one step closer to his prize.
And even with Leisen calling the shots, the Sturges touch was present. For one thing, there are a bevy of supporting players like Franklin Pangborn, Luis Alberni, Olaf Hytten, and William Demarest–regular performers in the Sturges classics yet to come. There’s the recurring Sturges trick of a sympathetic character singled out by Fate for unearned benefits (you could play a Sturges film back to back with a Fritz Lang one and their respective attitudes towards Fate would completely cancel each other out). And there’s the sense of a madcap universe, in which comic situations and absurdity abound in all directions.
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Although, to be true to Preston Sturges, we should say that all of these attributes are one and the same. A Sturges film is about a madcap universe rewarding the innocent and the naive, in which madness and comic intensity comes from all quarters–which of course depends on a reliable company of dependable performers. Easy Living is an early example of Sturges’ magic–and without his hand at the helm it is necessarily less Sturgesified than say Christmas in July or Palm Beach Story, but all the symptoms are there to diagnose.
And then there’s this–perhaps the most Sturges touch of them all: watching Easy Living, I found myself frequently laughing out loud without being entirely sure what the joke was that triggered it. This is a common experience for me when watching Sturges’ films. He builds such comic tension, layering new comic tensions atop old like a Jenga tower of farce, until just about anything–just the right inflection on a line, or a flick of someone’s eyes–causes all that tension to escape at once.
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Except… can I really credit that to Sturges here? Sure he wrote the brilliant screenplay, but isn’t that construction of comic tension at least as much the purview of the director? Can I really hail Easy Living as a screwball classic without paying tribute to Mitchell Leisen?
So–tune in next week when I’ll redress this imbalance, and give Mitchell Leisen his due.