Easy Living (1937)

Easy Living (1937)

There’s probably too much old-fashioned seeming slapstick for its own good (did a majority of the complex crowd-based physical comedy on display work then in ways it doesn’t work today? The simpler stuff, like phone lines getting tangled, works best,) but this is still a solid Preston Sturges’ Screwball Comedy.

He (Ray Milland) is the son of a rich investment banker (Edward Arnold) who has set out to prove he can get a job without his father’s influence.

She (Jean Arthur, playing it just a bit ditzy, even when there is nothing in the script that indicates it,) is just a regular, working girl.

The couple meets cute at an Automat he’s bussing tables at, which is the only place she can afford to eat; and both are bemused by the fact that, of late, she’s being given an expensive fur coat (and a replacement hat,) a free hotel penthouse suite (with egg) and a never-ending stream of luxury gifts for reasons that they can’t quite discern because of essential missing bits of information.

He is fired after getting her a free meal.

She had been previously fired after she came to work late wearing an inexplicable mink coat, or at least with an explanation no dirty-thinking, rational adult could believe.

But at least they now have a nice suite to stay in, which surprisingly for a post-Code film, they share. They even lie down together, though next day she wakes up in her own bed.

The banker himself is responsible for the gifted sable after a fight with his wife because of her unreasonable expenses; but of course, this random, out-of-simple-spite gift is misconstrued by everyone who finds out about it from the boys' magazine publishers, to the hat store manager (Franklin Pangborn,) to the banker’s servants, and up to and including a vaguely ethnic, malapropism-spouting, hotel owner (Luis Alberni) who borrowed from the banker and who is now dangerously close to foreclosure.

The hotel owner, hoping to blackmail the banker or at least to gain some leverage, offers the ‘protégé’ a penthouse suite, free of charge.

So far, so good.

But when the banker, finding his home empty because his wife left him, decides to stay at the near-vacant hotel the complexities of the plot verge on chaos; and, when a gossip columnist for the local social rag (William Demarest) gets a hold of the perceived but false scandal, they finally do.

Though not a classic beauty, there’s a je ne sais quoi about Jean Arthur (she looks vaguely like Kim Greist, here,) I find incredibly appealing. Is it just me?