Easy Living

One of Sturges' best screenplays, Easy Living was directed by Mitchell Leisen, and remains, with Midnight, one of its director's best comedies. As Andrew Sarris notes: “Curiously, Easy Living is the only film with which Sturges the writer was associated in the thirties that may be reasonably preferred to any of his own forties films. Not only is Easy Living funny and gracious and generous in the best Sturges tradition: it is velvety smooth and comfortably movieish in a way no Sturges-directed film ever was.” Jean Arthur stars as an aggressive working girl whose life is changed by an accidental 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's J.B. Ball), and a hilarious bit of extended slapstick in a food automat gone berserk.

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