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It's Jean Arthur week at the Brattle, and since the one Jean Arthur movie I've ever seen (The Talk of the Town) is one of the dozen or so films I'll watch any time anywhere with anybody, it really seemed I ought to give some of her other movies a shot as well.
After comparing the film list against our respective schedules,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genarti and I decided to shoot our shot on If You Could Only Cook and The Whole Town's Talking.
In If You Could Only Cook, Jean is down and out and scanning through job ads in the park when she suggests to the fellow down-and-out sharing her park bench that they should get fake married to apply for a well-paying cook-and-butler position. LITTLE DOES SHE KNOW that her fellow down-and-out is actually a millionaire auto executive who is only pretending to be down and out because the prospect of being fake married to Jean Arthur sounds like a hoot!
[We did spend some time after this trying to figure out if you could do a modern version of this plot, mostly because Jean Arthur's complaints about the job market do feel very contemporary and relatable, but it is hard to imagine a modern job that would require one to get fake married ....]
The most charming part of this movie is Jean Arthur's gangster employer, who falls deeply in love with her cooking and decides promptly that he is going to do whatever it takes to keep her happy and in his employ. Does she want to marry him? Great! Does she want to marry this other guy? We can make that happen! Does she want revenge on this other guy? Okay, boys, we're gonna rub him out, let's roll! Does she want him to go straight and do no more crimes? Well, that's fine, as long as he gets to keep eating her delicious garlic sauce.*
*Jean's secret trick for delicious garlic sauce is not to put any garlic IN the sauce but to WAFT a single clove of garlic PRECISELY SIX INCHES over the top of the sauce, no more and no less. This is obviously appalling but hey, it makes them both happy.
Anyway, it's a very light and fluffy screwball and made for fascinating double billing with The Whole Town's Talking (NOT to be confused with Talk of the Town), which also has Jean Arthur and a mob plot but is otherwise in no way comparable.
In this movie Jean is the wisecracking love interest to Edward G. Robinson as Jones, a sweet and shy salaryman who is unfortunately and coincidentally identical to MURDEROUS ESCAPED BANK ROBBER PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE!!! After Jones' public and embarrassing accidental arrest, the police eventually let him go with a little 'I'm not a bank robber please don't arrest me' ticket to carry around with him, which of course results in Shenanigans.
... although to Jones, buffeted between unasked-for fame on the one hand and MURDEROUS ESCAPED BANK ROBBER PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE!!!! on the other hand, they are not really Shenanigans; everyone around him is bouncing through a screwball (especially Jean Arthur, who has the time of her life being mistakenly arrested as a moll and is delightful doing it) but Jones is living a genuine nightmare. Obviously Edward G. Robinson is an extremely good actor and every time he's onscreen as his alter ego the whole genre shifts from lighthearted comedy into something very tense and suspenseful where murder could (and sometimes does!) really happen.
It makes for kind of a weird film -- it feels like it wants to be a witty Hitchcockian suspense thriller, something like North By Northwest or The Man Who Knew Too Much, but the genre hasn't quite been invented yet so instead it vibrates rapidly between the two poles. And it's pretty good at being whichever pole it's being! Everyone is very charming! You just sort of get whiplash on the way! Very cute to see Edward G. Robinson play comedy, though, and very cute to see him get the girl.
There is no explanation for why Jones and PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE are so identical and in the absence of other evidence I've got to assume they were part of an early Orphan Black-style cloning project and poor Jones is just going to keep running into inconvenient doppelRobinsons for the rest of his life.
After comparing the film list against our respective schedules,
genarti and I decided to shoot our shot on If You Could Only Cook and The Whole Town's Talking. In If You Could Only Cook, Jean is down and out and scanning through job ads in the park when she suggests to the fellow down-and-out sharing her park bench that they should get fake married to apply for a well-paying cook-and-butler position. LITTLE DOES SHE KNOW that her fellow down-and-out is actually a millionaire auto executive who is only pretending to be down and out because the prospect of being fake married to Jean Arthur sounds like a hoot!
[We did spend some time after this trying to figure out if you could do a modern version of this plot, mostly because Jean Arthur's complaints about the job market do feel very contemporary and relatable, but it is hard to imagine a modern job that would require one to get fake married ....]
The most charming part of this movie is Jean Arthur's gangster employer, who falls deeply in love with her cooking and decides promptly that he is going to do whatever it takes to keep her happy and in his employ. Does she want to marry him? Great! Does she want to marry this other guy? We can make that happen! Does she want revenge on this other guy? Okay, boys, we're gonna rub him out, let's roll! Does she want him to go straight and do no more crimes? Well, that's fine, as long as he gets to keep eating her delicious garlic sauce.*
*Jean's secret trick for delicious garlic sauce is not to put any garlic IN the sauce but to WAFT a single clove of garlic PRECISELY SIX INCHES over the top of the sauce, no more and no less. This is obviously appalling but hey, it makes them both happy.
Anyway, it's a very light and fluffy screwball and made for fascinating double billing with The Whole Town's Talking (NOT to be confused with Talk of the Town), which also has Jean Arthur and a mob plot but is otherwise in no way comparable.
In this movie Jean is the wisecracking love interest to Edward G. Robinson as Jones, a sweet and shy salaryman who is unfortunately and coincidentally identical to MURDEROUS ESCAPED BANK ROBBER PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE!!! After Jones' public and embarrassing accidental arrest, the police eventually let him go with a little 'I'm not a bank robber please don't arrest me' ticket to carry around with him, which of course results in Shenanigans.
... although to Jones, buffeted between unasked-for fame on the one hand and MURDEROUS ESCAPED BANK ROBBER PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE!!!! on the other hand, they are not really Shenanigans; everyone around him is bouncing through a screwball (especially Jean Arthur, who has the time of her life being mistakenly arrested as a moll and is delightful doing it) but Jones is living a genuine nightmare. Obviously Edward G. Robinson is an extremely good actor and every time he's onscreen as his alter ego the whole genre shifts from lighthearted comedy into something very tense and suspenseful where murder could (and sometimes does!) really happen.
It makes for kind of a weird film -- it feels like it wants to be a witty Hitchcockian suspense thriller, something like North By Northwest or The Man Who Knew Too Much, but the genre hasn't quite been invented yet so instead it vibrates rapidly between the two poles. And it's pretty good at being whichever pole it's being! Everyone is very charming! You just sort of get whiplash on the way! Very cute to see Edward G. Robinson play comedy, though, and very cute to see him get the girl.
There is no explanation for why Jones and PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE are so identical and in the absence of other evidence I've got to assume they were part of an early Orphan Black-style cloning project and poor Jones is just going to keep running into inconvenient doppelRobinsons for the rest of his life.
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I recommend Only Angels Have Wings (1939) because I love it desperately and have seen neither half of your double feature, the second half of which sounds bonkers! She is also delightful in the financial screwball of Easy Living (1937), lovely in the romantic disaster WTF of History Is Made at Night (1937), and convincing against type in the Mach 10 cynicism of A Foreign Affair (1948).
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I would love to hear your take on The Whole Town's Talking, tbh -- there are a couple of moments that really hit (I am still thinking about poor Jones reading a newspaper description of how Public Enemy Number One's Sinister Features clearly mark him for evil and depravity, then staring mournfully at himself in every mirror that he comes across; one's got to imagine Eddie G. Robinson really felt it) and I think you'd have interesting thoughts about it.
I was seriously tempted to go tonight to The More The Merrier and Adventure in Manhattan (the latter of which the Brattle describes as "almost too complicated to explain but involves a self-centered crime reporter (McCrea), a mysterious criminal mastermind, the star of the new play Fury’s Road (Arthur), and the theft of several famous and precious gems" but alas got myself counterscheduled at the last minute, so I truly hope they give me another shot at it at some point!
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People who aren't me even like it!
(I am still thinking about poor Jones reading a newspaper description of how Public Enemy Number One's Sinister Features clearly mark him for evil and depravity, then staring mournfully at himself in every mirror that he comes across; one's got to imagine Eddie G. Robinson really felt it)
It's like the one and a half movies where Peter Lorre gets to play the romantic lead! (I am permanently biased toward finding Edward G. Robinson adorable because I was introduced to him with Double Indemnity, but I have the same problem with Peter Lorre thanks to Arsenic and Old Lace.) I will keep an eye out for it; I feel like it came around once on TCM or Criterion, but during a stretch of time when it was irrelevant.
and Adventure in Manhattan (the latter of which the Brattle describes as "almost too complicated to explain but involves a self-centered crime reporter (McCrea), a mysterious criminal mastermind, the star of the new play Fury’s Road (Arthur), and the theft of several famous and precious gems"
I can see why you were tempted! I hope it makes itself available to you.
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[We did spend some time after this trying to figure out if you could do a modern version of this plot, mostly because Jean Arthur's complaints about the job market do feel very contemporary and relatable, but it is hard to imagine a modern job that would require one to get fake married ....] --
This is quitting talk, however! What else is the Eccentric Billionaire Employer™ for? I say we should have ten of these, stat.
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Completely unrelatedly, or almost, I was trying to find out more about Bobby/Robert Gordon, who was a child actor (young Jakie in The Jazz Singer, which is where I just saw him), and directed a bunch of stuff later. But there's almost nothing, except people mix him up with a different Robert Gordon who was a bit older. Otto Lederer was also pretty interesting.
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Live-in caretaker positions for married housekeeper/butler pairs and other roles are still very much a thing among the super rich! I read an article about it a couple years ago, though heck if I can track it down again now. My conclusion was that while the career had certain temptations (it does pay well, and since a lot of these positions are at vacation properties own by jet-setters who only visit a few weeks a year, you get a lot of privacy from your employer), it also involved way too much emotional labor for jerks for me to ever succeed. Also, I'm not married.
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Every so often I am advertised a new civil service posting that would mean my having a new job in Cyprus or New York or St Helena, but if I want full relocation expenses I need to show that I have a spouse or a long-term unmarried partner. I'm just saying.
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Also these both sound so much fun! Does Jean end up married to the millionaire pretending to be down-and-out because he wants to be fake-married to Jean Arthur, or to her gangster employer?
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