Written by Preston Sturges, Easy Living brings Depression-era hype hilariously down to earth, with Jean Arthur as an aggressive working girl whose life is changed by a fur coat that flies out a millionaire's window and lands on her head. James Harvey writes in Romantic Comedy, "In a way (Jean Arthur) completes the cycle of screwball heroines, confirming the tendency to move their glamor closer to ordinary life. Possibly the most distinctive thing about Arthur is that she's always so nice: that's the only word for it. And that quality is central in her as it never could be in the Colbert or the (Ginger) Rogers heroine. It's also helpless: she could never have played the opposite qualities, as Hepburn...and Lombard occasionally did...In Easy Living...it tells us almost everything we might hope to know about (the heroine she plays) that when she makes it big on the stock market-as she just has-the first thing she would want would be this big, impractical, unmanageable sort of dog, that she would get two of them and hold onto them in the midst of traffic. She is both accommodating and intransigent, both hopeless and hopeful. Just the sort of extraordinary 'ordinary' type-capricious and contradictory and embattled-that Preston Sturges often writes about."