Easy Living
If You Could Only Cook (1935)
directed by William A. Seiter
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Bill Seiter lets the month ride on the shoulders of one more remarkable Pre-Code blonde. Jean Arthur's Joan is out of work, and Herbert Marshall's Jim - an auto design genius beaten down by his own board of directors - takes her up on a happy scam she concocts at the park bench where they meet. Movies being what they are (great and gentle things), Joan is unaware of Jim's deep pockets, and Jim, in need of a change, pretends he's a butler in need of a job.
Employment, in other words, is only available to married couples. Joan can cook, and a retired bootlegger with an appetite hires them on. It's the escape Jim wants, not least from a pending marriage to a girl with a name but no real money. By day he buttles, and by night he slips over the balcony from the porch where he sleeps and picks up pretty uniforms for Joan.
Everyone falls in love with Joan, Jim and the gangster Rossini both. Neither wants possession as much as he'd like to see her happy. But a girl like Joan can't love a man who lies to her (her Henry Ford as John Lloyd Sullivan), and next to handsome Herbert Marshall, a crook with a heart of gold just can't compare.
Rossini's man Friday, Flash, is at the center of his family's redemption, encapsulated in a scene where Flash and Rossini witness Joan's broken heart. Seiter shoots a close-up on Joan's tears, holds it, then does the same for Rossini and Flash in turn. The men don't cry, but they stumble. They're not criminals, but good eggs, and there isn't a moment when Seiter once asks the audience to care for money or high society, next to a couple of goobers with guns.
When Joan catches Jim in his deception, she is outraged and offended. That broken heart guides her true but suffers no fool to blow hot and cold with words. She deserves the very best, and in Seiter's world the very best is simply time to raise a drink with friends and lovers. That, and maybe a prank on the cops, who listen in greedily as two scowling gangsters impersonate a husband and wife in matrimonial bliss from the well-tinted back seat of a limo. Ladies love outlaws and no romance should be without them.
directed by William A. Seiter
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Bill Seiter lets the month ride on the shoulders of one more remarkable Pre-Code blonde. Jean Arthur's Joan is out of work, and Herbert Marshall's Jim - an auto design genius beaten down by his own board of directors - takes her up on a happy scam she concocts at the park bench where they meet. Movies being what they are (great and gentle things), Joan is unaware of Jim's deep pockets, and Jim, in need of a change, pretends he's a butler in need of a job.
Employment, in other words, is only available to married couples. Joan can cook, and a retired bootlegger with an appetite hires them on. It's the escape Jim wants, not least from a pending marriage to a girl with a name but no real money. By day he buttles, and by night he slips over the balcony from the porch where he sleeps and picks up pretty uniforms for Joan.
Everyone falls in love with Joan, Jim and the gangster Rossini both. Neither wants possession as much as he'd like to see her happy. But a girl like Joan can't love a man who lies to her (her Henry Ford as John Lloyd Sullivan), and next to handsome Herbert Marshall, a crook with a heart of gold just can't compare.
Rossini's man Friday, Flash, is at the center of his family's redemption, encapsulated in a scene where Flash and Rossini witness Joan's broken heart. Seiter shoots a close-up on Joan's tears, holds it, then does the same for Rossini and Flash in turn. The men don't cry, but they stumble. They're not criminals, but good eggs, and there isn't a moment when Seiter once asks the audience to care for money or high society, next to a couple of goobers with guns.
When Joan catches Jim in his deception, she is outraged and offended. That broken heart guides her true but suffers no fool to blow hot and cold with words. She deserves the very best, and in Seiter's world the very best is simply time to raise a drink with friends and lovers. That, and maybe a prank on the cops, who listen in greedily as two scowling gangsters impersonate a husband and wife in matrimonial bliss from the well-tinted back seat of a limo. Ladies love outlaws and no romance should be without them.
posted by NPK at 9:20 AM
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