EASY LIVING (67)

Directed by: Mitchell Leisen (1937)

Starring: Jean Arthur, Ray Milland, Edward Arnold, Luis Alberni

The Pitch: A fur coat thrown out the window by a millionaire lands on a typist, changing her life.

Theo Sez: Aptly-titled screwball comedy, easiness being its most attractive quality - a devil-may-care attitude towards plotting, a steady flow of verbal non sequiturs, and the same eclecticism about gags that marked the later films of Preston Sturges (who wrote this one), going from satire to slapstick to the kind of low burlesque that could never make it past the PC police today (Franklin Pangborn's effeminate couturier ("Well we think it's very recherche"), or the fractured English of Alberni's immigrant hotelier). In many ways it shows why so few of today's attempts at screwball comedy are successful (no, it's not because they all star Meg Ryan) : they pile on the complications and - influenced perhaps by TV sitcoms - try to keep the scenes as tight and zinger-filled as possible ; whereas in fact this is as loose as a Jim Carrey joke movie, only filling the gaps with wit instead of toilet humour. It's not as great as its reputation would suggest - not as rich a mix as BRINGING-UP BABY or THE LADY EVE, and Milland is a liability as the hero, trying to be zany and failing miserably (he'd have done better to play it straight, a la Don Ameche) - but it's a lot of fun. Favourite joke : the running gag about banker Arnold's increasingly exasperated attempts to explain compound interest to our heroine, using ever more outlandish examples - going from "Let's say a farmer has a hundred cows" to, an hour later, "There was once a schoolboy named Willie Jones who wanted to buy a hundred marbles..."