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. There is some priceless satire of the bombastic rich (in the person of Edward Arnold) and a hilarious bit of extended slapstick in a food automat gone berserk. 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...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."