Effervescent blonde Jean Arthur is best known for three Frank Capra films she made in the late 1930s: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), You Can’t Take It With You (1938), and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Though she occasionally starred in dramas (and ended her career in a classic 1953 western, Shane), she was best known as the star of outrageous comedies. Of course I’ve seen her best-known films, but my local library has a nifty compilation of comic gems, Icons of Screwball Comedy (volume 1). I brought it home because I was interested in re-watching My Sister Eileen, starring Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair. But the two standouts of the collection both featured Arthur: 1935’s If You Could Only Cook and 1940’s Too Many Husbands.
If You Could Only Cook is a classic Depression-era film, in which a wealthy, pedigreed automobile designer—suddenly unemployed because of an idealistic stand at a board meeting—allows himself to be persuaded by Arthur’s out-of-work Joan Hawthorne that the two of them, posing as a married couple, should apply for a job as cook and butler for a pair of thugs (Leo Carrillo and his gravel-voiced enforcer, Lionel Stander) Fortunately, Joan really can cook –so much for that catchy title—but Herbert Marshall’s Jim needs to sneak home to his mansion to get on-the-job instructions from his own loyal retainer.
Since this is a Depression comedy, the wealthy don’t come off very well, but leading man Marshall seems much improved by the time he spends slumming. He and Arthur have some great comic scenes in which they must work out who’s going to sleep where, but ultimately he’s all too ready give up his stuffy fiancée and (of course!) make a life with the thoroughly middle-class Arthur. That’s after she’s packed off to jail following a good-hearted misunderstanding. (In 1930s flicks, there’s often a lot of jail time.)
By 1940, social issues were not quite so front-and-center. But the screwball trend persisted. In Too Many Husbands, Arthur is Vicky Lowndes, married to Melvyn Douglas’s businessman Henry Lowndes, since six months after her first husband, Bill Cardew (Fred MacMurray) disappeared at sea. The new marriage seems to be going swimmingly, though Vicky is perturbed when Henry removes the name of his presumably-dead best friend and business partner from the door of an office suite they once shared. But, wouldn’t you know? On the very day that the name disappears, Bill turns up. Not knowing about the change in his wife’s marital status, he of course figures that their connubial life will resume immediately.
Too Many Husbands sets up an impossible situation, and then waits to see how the characters will solve it. What’s interesting is that Arthur’s Vicky has no wish to choose between two worthy but very different men. There’s a moment midway through the film where we clearly see it in her face: this is going to be fun! In 1940, a ménage à trois was not something that could be publicly endorsed, but the final scene – Vicky dancing simultaneously with both men in a nightclub—hints that something of the sort is perhaps a possibility. (To be fair, there’s a Noel Coward play and pre-code movie, Design for Living, with a rather similar ending.)
Early in her career, Jean Arthur was advised to quit show business, because she just wasn’t sexy enough. Personally, I find her pert and adorable, a big improvement over the classic vamps who are trying so hard to get our attention. And she can cook too!
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