If You Could Only Cook (1935)

Jim Buchanan (Herbert Marshall), a frustrated and soon to be married automobile executive & car designer engineer inadvertently steps into a Prince and the Pauper situation when he sits on a park bench next to Joan Hawthorne, a desperate girl who’s looking for work (Jean Arthur.)

She mistakes him for a jobless man and proposes they seek employment as a butler/cook team.

It’s surprising how quickly the two characters engage audience sympathy not just individually but also as a couple, probably helped by the fact that Buchanan has been shown to be concerned that he doesn’t feel head-over-heels in love with his soon to be bride; and that a quick scene with his fiancé (Frieda Inescort) hints at some suspicious business on her end.

Jean Arthur projects a vulnerability that not only works on Marshall’s character but also extends to the audience.

We want her to get that job she so desperately wants, and immediately understand why Buchanan would take a week off from his job and his engagement to help this poor girl out.

He doesn’t immediately reveal his real identity (they are now both passing as a couple named Burns) which makes it more difficult for him to do so as he sinks deeper and deeper into the obviously untenable situation; but it’s clear he’s only got a week before he will be required to do something about it.

The plan works out much too successfully.

They obtain employment as live-in employees with an ex-bootlegger (Leo Carrillo) who is looking for new opportunities in crime now that Prohibition is over.

Their new boss is smitten his very attractive cook, but his bodyguard (Lionel Stander) becomes suspicious of the couple and starts tailing Buchanan/Burns – there is too much that doesn’t quite jibe in his eyes, starting with the fact that (because they are not married) Buchanan/Burns is made to sleep outside on the porch.

Even though the couple have known each other for less than a week they both have an opportunity to feel jealous: He when he catches the boss kissing his ‘wife’; and she because he steps out for some lightning-fast session of butler training (among other errands he is unable to do under his fake persona) and it’s obvious he’s spending his nights elsewhere.

From then on, the complications pile on to eventually include a murder contract and eventual kidnapping.

This is part of the Icons of Screwball Comedy, and while there is a fair amount of comedy and enough contrivances for one the humor is mostly all in the direction.

There were critical complaints of it being “humorless,” which is clearly not true, but if sought strictly as a Comedy it might certainly seem so. Directed differently, the film could have easily been simply a dramatic, romantic, Thriller.

The film’s title is taken straight out of the script, and yet it feels not quite memorable enough and ill-suited for the resulting work.