Comedy the Jean Arthur Way

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! 

 

 

Choosing Between The Devil and Miss Jones

If you think The Devil and Miss Jones is an adult film akin to Deep Throat, you’re in the wrong era (and the wrong mindset) entirely. In 1973, one year after the frankly pornographic Deep Throat became a surprise success among hip moviegoers, its filmmaker, Gerard Damiano, launched a second film, coyly titling it The Devil in Miss Jones. No, I’ve never seen it.

 But I’ve just watched The Devil and Miss Jones, and been pleasantly surprised.. Released by RKO in 1941, this is a whimsical workplace comedy, starring Jean Arthur, whose stellar career stretched from silent movies to 1953’s Shane. This vibrant gal with the distinctively throaty voice may be best remembered for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But she’s never been more memorable than as Mary Jones, a New York department store salesclerk with a yen for a would-be union organizer played by the young Bob Cummings. Forget about that title: this is not a supernatural fable, like Cabin in the Sky. Though the  ecstatically happy ending is clearly a fantasy, there’s no devil here, unless you mean the apparently heartless business tycoon brilliantly played by Charles Coburn. Looking down at the world from his mansion just off Bryant Park, he scorns the common folk who labor in the department store that’s part of his vast holdings. When some of them dare to demonstrate against upper management, parading with an effigy that represents him, he vows revenge. But things hardly work out as planned.

 For various reasons, Coburn’s character decides to personally masquerade as a department-store clerk, the better to spy on the rebel faction on the fifth floor. Pretending to be the amiable, unsophisticated Tom, he sets about selling men’s and women’s slippers, under the tutelage of the spunky Mary. Wouldn’t you know it? He comes to respect the hardworking employees who try their best, but are often undercut by managerial types who don’t understand their issues.

 Everything comes to a head on a day-off trip to Coney Island, where Mary speaks eloquently about her love for her beau, while Coburn’s tycoon becomes more and more enamored of the gentle Elizabeth (Spring Byington), who frankly muses to him that she could never marry a rich man for fear of doubting her own motives. There’s also a kerfuffle over the wine he’s brought along: the others in the party, unused to anything other than the rotgut made by a janitor stomping grapes in his bathtub, disdain his priceless vintage and try to add soda-pop to kill its taste. Oh yes, there’s also eventually a near-arrest, followed by a trip to the police station, where things look bad for our main character until Mary’s swain quotes dollops of the U.S. Constitution, bravely defying authority figures and winning Coburn’s respect.

 The cinematography in this film—always vivid—takes on special dimensions in these beach scenes, as director Sam Wood crams his frame with hordes of frolicking extras, making clear how hard it is for the working class to find privacy, even during leisure hours. There are also some terrific opening shots in which the tycoon’s cadre of toadies are driven up to his mansion, one after the other, in their sleek black limousines: the cars are filmed at such a low angle that they look like monstrous beasts of prey.

 Despite the star presence of Jean Arthur, this is largely third-billed Coburn’s show, as we see him melt from ferociousness into joviality. His is one of two Oscar nominations earned by The Devil and Miss Jones. The other, well-deserved, is for Norman Krasna’s script.

 

 

“A Foreign Affair”: Billy Wilder 's Bittersweet Take on Post-War Germany

My Billy Wilder journey continues, as I work my way through Joe McBride's comprehensive Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge. This week I saw one of Wilder’s more unheralded triumphs, the 1948 A Foreign Affair. This dark romantic comedy stands out partly because of where it was filmed: in the rubble of Berlin, following the end of World War II. (At the close of his wartime service in the U.S. Army, Wilder was promised government assistance if he shot a movie in occupied Deutschland, thus giving a boost to the ruined German economy as well as to the revival of the German film industry.) A Foreign Affair deals, sometimes sardonically, with the Allies’ efforts to rebuild the devastated German capital. But its primary subject is, as always with Wilder, the vagaries of the human heart. Though Nazis, and their collaborators, are hardly looked on with favor in the course of the film, the occupying American army does not escape unscathed. And a visiting American congressional delegation on a fact-finding tour is treated with all the satirical thrust that Wilder can muster.

Jean Arthur came out of retirement to play Phoebe Frost, a strait-laced Iowa congresswoman bent on improving the morale of the occupying U.S. troops. When she strays from the official tour, she’s alarmed to find that young American servicemen, mistaking her for a blonde fraulein, are eager to canoodle. She’s also appalled when she observes that locals (especially attractive young women) are more than happy to bestow their favors on Americans who can provide them with chocolate bars and nylon stockings. Pretending to be a giggly German maedchen, she goes along with two G.I. Joes to a seedy local club. That’s where she frowns with disapproval on a nightclub singer, Erika von Schlütow, played by Marlene Dietrich with her usual potent mix of glamour and irony.

Though Dietrich herself was known for her unrelenting opposition to Hitler and his thugs, her character in this film represents the German citizens who will do whatever it takes to get by. That’s why, although she’s embroiled in a powerful (and possibly sado-masochistic) relationship with an American officer, John Lund’s Captain Pringle, there’s also a Nazi higher-up lurking in her past. The film’s most striking moments involve her encounters with Congresswoman Frost, who in an ironic turnabout must look to Erika to save her from public humiliation, not to mention  legal jeopardy. Connecting the two women is Captain Pringle, who is not above taking on romance as part of his military duties.

 Looking back on Wilder’s life, as McBride does so effectively, it’s rather startling to see him focusing on the post-war neediness of the German populace. Wilder, a Jewish man who grew up in Vienna and began his filmmaking career in Berlin, was never able to save his own mother and other relatives from the Nazi death camps. Needless to say, he had no great love for the German hierarchy that led the country into war. And his life in the United States, from 1933 onward, paved the way for fame and fortune in his adopted land. Still, unlike Congresswoman Phoebe Frost, he cannot view the German people as undeserving of sympathy.  Scrounging for food and small luxury items (as well as the occasional moment of fun) in their bombed-out city, they awaken his compassion. And it’s in keeping with his mordant temperament that he resists simple delineations of right and wrong. So A Foreign Affair offers up not (as per its poster) hilarious comedy, but rather food for thought, which is far more nourishing than a chocolate bar.

 Joe McBride, the man himself, adds to this post with some important info for cinéastes:"Did you know I did the audio commentary on the recent Kino Lorber Blu-ray edition?For a long time the film was MIA in home video." He adds the all-important Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Foreign-Affair-Blu-ray-Jean-Arthur/dp/B07SNNNMQ7