According to legend, Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed greeted a visitor with this line: "Dying is easy, comedy is hard." It's apocryphal. But "Easy Living" makes comedy look easy. This is hands down one of the best screwball comedies of Hollywood's golden age of screwball comedies. It's heavier on the slapstick than some, but with more of a serious underlying message than others. "My Man Godfrey" meets "Bringing Up Baby." I imagine - not being an actor, I can't pretend to expertise - that Edmund Gwenn was correct. Comedy must be hard, to get the timing, the inflection, the spirit just right. That's judging by how many dramatic actors and actresses never even tried it. The great ones could pull it off, Stanwyck, Hepburn, James Cagney and Bette Davis (I'm thinking of "The Bride Came C.O.D.") switching seamlessly from melodrama to merriment. Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold were masters at it. It is uncanny how Arnold could take the same character and play it for laughs as he does here or in "You Can't Take it With You," or turn it into a menacing villain ("Meet John Doe," "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington"), and be equally convincing. We might also include the marvelous Mary Nash, who did this light comedy then immediately tormented Shirley Temple's Heidi back to back.
Of course, a comedy cannot succeed without comedic actors. "Easy Living" deploys the best, Luis Alberni, Franklin Pangborn, Esther Dale, Robert Greig, and lets them loose. The movie's classic moment is the automat scene. I'm old enough to remember eating in automats in NYC. The movie gets the ambiance exactly right. (I think some entrepreneur ought to bring automats back. They were restaurants. You could eat a meal, not gobble junk - Big Mac with cheese prefab chicken extra crispy or extra grease.) Be that as it may, food fight scenes are a tricky business. How many pies in the face are excess? How many pratfalls are too many? Mitchell Leisen does this one superbly. It's hilarious without becoming tedious. Notice how, with people slipping and sliding and pratfalling all around her, Jean Arthur sits calmly eating her dinner. She's hungry. I do think, really, that the film's quieter comedy is its best. The scene in the limo where Mary completely befuddles the great banker calculating the yearly rate of monthly interest is so right on. "No, No. Listen. If a farmer had 100 cows ..." It had me laughing intermittently for the rest of the film. An hour later in the movie J.B. is still confounded. He starts to dictate a letter to Lillian the secretary (played wonderfully by Esther Dale) trying again to solve the conundrum. He keeps getting interrupted by the stock market ticker. The interruptions inject themselves into the dictation. Or take the scene where Mary and John rest head to head on the sofa. She turns to find him fast asleep. The little look Jean Arthur gives the camera, half laughing half pitying, is pure perfection.
Finally, there is the message. It is a cross between a screwball and a social comedy, a touch of "The Devil and Miss Jones." Twice Mary is reduced to her last dime. She apologizes to the piggy bank before breaking it. She can't afford a nickel at the automat. She can't afford $7 rent for her cramped apartment. Contrast that living space with the hotel suite (or should I say suit?). It is the most extravagant mass of rooms I can recall in any movie. First drawing room, second drawing room, third drawing room; you need a roadmap not to get lost in one penthouse. There was really no need to design such over-the-top opulence, except to drive home the point, the penury of average people and the excesses of the 1% at the top. Notice how, with luxury on all sides, Louis Louis mistakenly opens a door and a ladder falls out of a little closet, just as a ladder or a wall-bed might fall of the wall of a jammed tenement. What is it doing in this place? It's a reminder of the real world. The movie mocks the imbecilities of market capitalism. John Ball's offhand joke, attributed to his father, sets off a selling frenzy that nearly crashes the market. I remember in 1996 Alan Greenspan suggested that stocks were indulging in "irrational exuberance" and with that one remark the market wiped out a billion dollars in assets.
Mitchell Leisen took a lot of heat from screenwriters, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder ("Hold Back the Dawn") who accused him of spoiling their scripts. He didn't spoil anything. His misfortune was to direct the scripts of writers who also wanted to be directors. Mitchell Leisen is undeservedly overlooked. He merits much more recognition, especially for gems like "Easy Living."
Of course, a comedy cannot succeed without comedic actors. "Easy Living" deploys the best, Luis Alberni, Franklin Pangborn, Esther Dale, Robert Greig, and lets them loose. The movie's classic moment is the automat scene. I'm old enough to remember eating in automats in NYC. The movie gets the ambiance exactly right. (I think some entrepreneur ought to bring automats back. They were restaurants. You could eat a meal, not gobble junk - Big Mac with cheese prefab chicken extra crispy or extra grease.) Be that as it may, food fight scenes are a tricky business. How many pies in the face are excess? How many pratfalls are too many? Mitchell Leisen does this one superbly. It's hilarious without becoming tedious. Notice how, with people slipping and sliding and pratfalling all around her, Jean Arthur sits calmly eating her dinner. She's hungry. I do think, really, that the film's quieter comedy is its best. The scene in the limo where Mary completely befuddles the great banker calculating the yearly rate of monthly interest is so right on. "No, No. Listen. If a farmer had 100 cows ..." It had me laughing intermittently for the rest of the film. An hour later in the movie J.B. is still confounded. He starts to dictate a letter to Lillian the secretary (played wonderfully by Esther Dale) trying again to solve the conundrum. He keeps getting interrupted by the stock market ticker. The interruptions inject themselves into the dictation. Or take the scene where Mary and John rest head to head on the sofa. She turns to find him fast asleep. The little look Jean Arthur gives the camera, half laughing half pitying, is pure perfection.
Finally, there is the message. It is a cross between a screwball and a social comedy, a touch of "The Devil and Miss Jones." Twice Mary is reduced to her last dime. She apologizes to the piggy bank before breaking it. She can't afford a nickel at the automat. She can't afford $7 rent for her cramped apartment. Contrast that living space with the hotel suite (or should I say suit?). It is the most extravagant mass of rooms I can recall in any movie. First drawing room, second drawing room, third drawing room; you need a roadmap not to get lost in one penthouse. There was really no need to design such over-the-top opulence, except to drive home the point, the penury of average people and the excesses of the 1% at the top. Notice how, with luxury on all sides, Louis Louis mistakenly opens a door and a ladder falls out of a little closet, just as a ladder or a wall-bed might fall of the wall of a jammed tenement. What is it doing in this place? It's a reminder of the real world. The movie mocks the imbecilities of market capitalism. John Ball's offhand joke, attributed to his father, sets off a selling frenzy that nearly crashes the market. I remember in 1996 Alan Greenspan suggested that stocks were indulging in "irrational exuberance" and with that one remark the market wiped out a billion dollars in assets.
Mitchell Leisen took a lot of heat from screenwriters, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder ("Hold Back the Dawn") who accused him of spoiling their scripts. He didn't spoil anything. His misfortune was to direct the scripts of writers who also wanted to be directors. Mitchell Leisen is undeservedly overlooked. He merits much more recognition, especially for gems like "Easy Living."