Easy Living

One of Preston Sturges’s best screenplays, Easy Living was directed by Mitchell Leisen, and it remains one of its director’s finest comedies. As Andrew Sarris noted: “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 a working girl whose life is changed by a fur coat that is tossed out from 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, improbably staffed by a young Ray Milland.

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