Easy Living figures in everyone’s canon of classic Hollywood comedies. With a screenplay by Preston Sturges, a luminous performance by Jean Arthur, and one of the looniest farcical premises in the whole genre (not the looniest — that would be Christmas in July), it seems to stand alone. The brilliant script includes some of the funniest of Sturges’s trademark warp-speed miscommunications, dizzying misprisions, extravagant minor characters, and “kismet” plot motivations that seem to come directly from the Comic Spirit.
Even so, most film historians and critics tend to low-key the film as basically not up to the Olympian standard of the films that Sturges directed himself. Sturges, the golden boy of comedy screenwriters at the time, shopped his script to director Mitchell Leisen himself, and Leisen took it on enthusiastically. Ironically, Sturges would resent that to the end. (Sturges was energetically trying to get the studio to let him direct his own screenplays — which took a few more years to happen, with spectacular success.) Leisen was Paramount’s top director then, so the project was treated with respect and funding, but Sturges developed an allergy to Leisen’s style. During and after the filming Sturges complained that his dazzling dialogue was muffled by Leisen’s excessive concern with scene setting and decor. He called Leisen an “interior decorator.” (Leisen did in fact moonlight as a professional interior decorator.) As Sturges biographer Diane Jacobs puts it, “Sturges complained that Leisen overwhelmed his dialogue with ornate sets and physical business.” Billy Wilder had a similar slam on Leisen regarding Midnight, a film that Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote and Leisen directed two years after Easy Living. Wilder complained that Leisen was more interested in measuring the length of the drapes than in his dialogue. That makes two great comedy screenwriters who were propelled into directing by their irritation at Mitchell Leisen’s perceived lack of respect for their screenplays.
Leisen has an uneven body of work. He was not a genius. But he directed at least two monumental comedies of the era in Easy Living and Midnight. The current admiration for brilliant comic writer-directors has, I think, prejudiced how we view Leisen at his best. Some of it may have come from simple bigotry. There’s plenty of evidence that Wilder had contempt for Leisen because he was gay (he was also married, which may have incensed Wilder even more). Wilder called him a “window dresser.” Sturges’s jab about Leisen being an interior decorator is the same kind of thing. Leisen’s reputation has improved of late; several historians and scholars now see him as as an original camp artist worthy of being considered a visual auteur. Since I love Easy Living and Midnight a lot, I think it’s important to take another look at this kerfuffle.
Easy Living has some classic Sturges exchanges, and the pace of patter and crazy dialogue matter as much in it as in any Sturges-directed comedy. But I think it’s clear that the word-centered artists like Sturges and Wilder simply didn’t appreciate Leisen’s particular gift for comic cinema. The wordsmiths are all about words — obviously — and verbal humor. What they did not understand was how brilliant Leisen could be in making comedy with objects. In Easy Living, objects rule. The action takes place in a world ruled by objects, and the comic action depends more on objects and material details than on human people. What Sturges disparaged as “decor” — in other words, as background objects — was actually a world of objects as comic devices. Given its historical moment in the Depression, the unreformed American reverence for material wealth, and the New Deal enthusiasm for new, fair “prosperity,” a comedy in which objects define the character of the human is perfectly appropriate.
I’ll probably write about other aspects of Easy Living in future posts, but here I’d like to focus on this quality of “object oriented comedy.” Comedy loves things that disrupt automatic human relationships. Here’s how I see it. The Comic Spirit is basically Puck — or Hermes, if you prefer more classical stuff. It delights in fomenting chaos out of humans’ pretensions to create and maintain order in the human image. The human desire to organize the world into a smoothly running desiring-machine is the Comic Spirit’s target, and it can use anything in the world as a monkey wrench to throw into the gears. Much of the time it uses language, exploiting all its potentials for miscommunication. That’s the realistic end of the spectrum. At the other, more fantastic end, it delights in taking possession of things that humans like to think lack intentions and sentience, but that can magically become animate and assert minds of their own, without much regard for the human characters’ will to power. Or, alternatively, they can embody comic inertia — since humans try to condense their worth and wealth into things that won’t change, objects may stubbornly refuse to move when humans want them to. Comic objects can be animals, clothes, tools, food, furniture, decorations, even body parts that seem to have desires distinct from the body as a whole. Some comedies are completely governed by comic objects — The Italian Straw Hat, The Twelve Chairs, The General and The Navigator, Bringing Up Baby with its intercostal clavicle, Tales of Manhattan with its cursed tailcoat, to mention just a few. Objects like these take on the aura of comic fetishes.
The phrase “physical comedy” could just as well be translated as “comedy of objects,” since clowning is all about the ways that humans have to deal with objects that keep getting in their way (or that we expect will get in their way, but don’t) — including, and maybe especially, their own bodies. Silent film slapstick developed this kind of object oriented comedy into high art. The core cinematic elements of silent comedy, such as distance shots and shadow-free lighting, are means to make objects of the decor visible, so that they can become comic when they unexpectedly come to life or block human characters’ free movements.
Some of the negative reviews of Easy Living at the time of its release (there were quite a few) took exception to all the slapstick scenes. There are lots of them. It surprised me to learn that Leisen didn’t have a history directing silent comedies like Leo McCarey and Edward Sutherland. To me that signals that this marriage of slapstick and wit is something original — and it’s a fair bet that Sturges learned a lot about how to combine the two by watching the finished Easy Living. It’s a commonplace among film historians that Easy Living is a situational, as opposed to a character-driven, comedy — another word often used about it is “circumstantial.” One arbitrary event happens — the “kismet” of a sable coat thrown from a penthouse landing on the noggin of Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) as the open upper-decker bus she’s riding passes underneath — and a cascade of misunderstandings, gifts, and minor catastrophes ensues that none of the characters directs, or even acknowledges. What distinguishes the film’s “circumstances” from simpler situation comedies is that material details and objects have at least as much power and aura as do most of the humans who live among them.
My feeling is that Easy Living is distinctive, maybe even unique, in the way that Leisen’s visual “business” and Sturges’s scintillating screenplay are synthesized into something neither of them could have done alone.
It starts at the beginning. The most memorable image from the film — and one of the most memorable in the genre — is the jettisoned sable coat sailing down to 5th Avenue like a manta ray.
The coat is actually the peak of a pile of contested objects leading up to it, the objects in J.B. Ball’s penthouse household that seem to be the only things they care about — in order of mention and appearance: lard, a ladder, a black cat (in this film, animals count as objects), an Italian sports car, a broom, and a sheet hanging on a clothesline, each of which seems to be deployed against the bankster J.B. Ball (Edward Arnold), the “Bull of Broad Street.” He’s the constantly blustering classical rich miserly WASP tycoon preaching the Protestant hardscrabble ethic (though his father was also a banker), stuck between his extravagant family and his hypocritical moral upstanditude. Leisen added a lot of “business” to Sturges’s script — and it fits. The objects, especially the lowly ones, are constantly in J.B.’s way, and the high-class Kolinsky sable leads to a good old fashioned slapstick pratfall complete with breaking china and the table on which it was arrayed. In his frustration, J.B. throws the coat from the penthouse balcony out of revenge as much against a world of objects that confound his will as against his spendthrift wife.
In the next scene, Mary goes door to door in the 5th Avenue neighborhood, seeking the coat’s owner, and runs into J.B. (who has just negotiated two more slapstick objects, lard again and a goldfish bowl dropped from the heights by Mrs. Ball). He officially gifts the coat to Mary and gives her a ride to a hat shop to replace her cap, whose feather the falling coat has bent out of shape. The dialogue that follows between them in the car is all Sturges, but it intersects with Leisen’s object comedy in a surprising way. It’s a scene of verbal slapstick about numbers. A unique characteristic of Sturges’s humor that I haven’t seen mentioned is how often he uses counting jokes in his scripts. His characters are always invoking numbers and then miscounting. I can’t think of any other comic writer who has so much fun with counting, and Easy Living has more of these jokes than any of his other films. Jokes about numbers and counting are really interesting — numbers are words, but they are also objects; there just can’t be as much ambiguity about numbers as most words. J.B.’s whole world depends on people buying in to his world of numbers. So Sturges has working-girl Mary and banker J.B. get into an argument about compound interest. (In my own experience, it’s a topic of conversation that’s guaranteed to be comic in the real world.) Like dogs on leashes wrapping themselves around characters’ legs, numbers are getting tangled up.
Soon after, as Mary’s acquisition of the coat is pruriently misunderstood by everyone, even casual passersby, J.B. is visited by Louis “Louie” Louis, former elite chef and new owner of a luxury hotel, who has come to pay — not his loan installment, but his “respects.” Alberni was one of the actors Sturges asked for. His gift for slippy language, funny accents, and malapropisms is perfect for Sturges’s special kind of verbal crazy-making. Here we get jokes with numbers again, superadded onto jokes about time.
Meanwhile, Mary is fired from her job at the stuffy puritanical magazine The Boy’s Constant Companion (which J.B. hilariously misprizes as The Boy’s Constant Reminder) and returns to her little apartment. She now owns a sable coat but she’s hungry, owes back rent, and is nearly penniless. She has no recourse but to smash her piggy bank for the few dimes it contains — but first she blindfolds it as a pre-execution mercy. It’s a lovely scene that shows how the Leisen-Sturges partnership works. It’s entirely nonverbal and beautifully shot — by Ted Tetzlaff, one of the creators of the velvety visual style of late 30s and early 40s Hollywood films that featured glamorous female stars. One might think it’s a clear example of Leisen emphasizing visual background over Sturges’s words. But the script shows that Sturges cared a lot about the objects in the scene — it even specifies that “the pig is decorated with roses.” The movie’s pig is plainer, yet the intended sweetness is made smarter by adding the blindfold, a detail not in the script. (We also hear in the underscore a great swing version of Ralph Rainger’s “Easy Living,” a song that’s never sung in the film despite it being in the title. It’s a puzzle how this cheerful tune became a smoldering smoky blues standard.) While searching for the dimes that have escaped from the piggy bank, Mary finds a telegram has been slipped under her door — it’s from Louie, requesting her presence at his hotel.
Badly needing a quick word-of-mouth boost for his hotel and mistakenly believing that Mary is J.B.’s side “chicken” with unlimited access to his munificence, Louie invites Mary to stay in his best, most expensive apartment, “the Imperial Suit.” Mary suspects nothing, even though everyone is treating her — decked out now in her elegant coat and hat — as a kept woman. In one of my favorite scenes, Louie shows Mary around her prospective digs, and it’s Leisen and Sturges at their best. The Wonderland Mary is introduced to is crazy with extravagant decor — the lumpen Louie’s idea of high-class furnishings. “A nice place to flop, eh?” And we get more counting jokes.
As in all of Sturges’s own films, Louie is in a mix with a crowd of other eccentric supporting clowns, but in Easy Living he’s a star. This extended riff between two pixillated characters in a loony setting isn’t as satirically biting as it could be because both Mary and Louie are basically earthy interlopers in what is for them an enchanted world. There’s a core misunderstanding going on between them. It’s about money (counting again). Both of them need it, and neither of them has any command over it. Of course, no one in Easy Living has control of it, not even J.B. Louie thinks Mary can pay, while Mary hasn’t any idea how a poor working girl like her can do so. And they aren’t so different, really, since neither of them knows much about money — or counting. Of all the characters, they are most alike in all this, all the better to set off Louie’s lunacy against Mary’s WTF bewilderment.
If the slam on Leisen was that he was focused on decor to the detriment of pacing and story, this is the scene to test it. Leisen was trained as an architect and cut his teeth as a costume designer and art director. He cared about the set because, as he put it, he needed to give characters “background.” So here we have background in spades. Leisen said that he used most of the studio’s set-design technicians and craftsmen on the studio’s largest soundstage to create the “suit” and it’s worth taking some time to contemplate it.
It begins with Louie’s outsized boutonniere and key ring, an enormous hoop with a single key that is actually attached to a chain that leads to his vest pocket.
Then comes the kitsch-classical clutter, with Cocteau-like puzzled busts onlooking.
A joke about the ladder, every New York apartment’s conniving ghost.
“The Main Saloon.”
The white piano. (We’re in balls-out parody of RKO’s Big White Set now. Astaire would be hard pressed to find space to dance in here.)
The organic principle of Deco is getting out of hand.
“Invisible” doors.
.
Louie waxes enthusiastic about the facing mirrors. (Sturges included facing mirrors more than once in the script.)
The bath. “What’s it for?” “For Wash!”
.
And “last but not least,” Mary’s bedroom. Louie: “Nice place to flop, eh?”
The way out of the Imperial Suit.
Very little of all this is in Sturges’s final script (which, truth be told, is even funnier than what eventually made it to the screen). I assume that Alberni improvised much of his patter, but the zanily cluttered white set is the opposite of improvisation. (Only the ladder and the “horse” were scripted.) The opposite of elegant decor, the Imperial Suit is an inspired parody of the Astaire-Rogers Big White Set — with no room for a dance. And yet, as Louie’s enthusiasm for it grows, he is transformed into an anti-Astaire, leaping onto the furniture and mis-negotiating the dismounts.
This brilliant underappreciated scene is followed closely by a more famous one, the food riot at the Automat.
Although Sturges’s script for the scene is detailed, it includes little dialogue and many of the objects we see in play. Leisen’s role here wasn’t “decor,” but action. Contrasting with the high-class clutter of immovable furniture in Louie’s hotel is the manic movement of humans, machines, and food in the Automat, an elaborately orchestrated slapstick symphony. Mary, wearing her sable coat but starving, is once again a quiet, bemused witness to hyperkinetic lunacy.
Sturges’s satire is never moralistic. Nobody gets a sentimental free pass. The clear Depression-era emphasis on food and hunger — a recurring background theme in Easy Living — isn’t political for Sturges. It’s the way things are, and real-world hunger is transformed into one of the basic tropes of comedy going back to the Athenians, the utopian dream of “free food.” (It’s important to note that by 1937, the year the film was released, the U.S. economy had largely, if only temporarily, emerged from Depression conditions. The humor of the Automat’s food riot must have come from a place of comfort.)
Throughout the film, objects have fates and personalities. Some are thrown (fur coats — twice, goldfish bowls, plates), some are smashed (china, piggy banks, automat dishes), some go haywire (mechanical horses, the automat’s doors and fountains, the Imperial Suit’s bathtub, J.B.’s ticker tape), some pose and lie around luxuriously (the accoutrements of the Imperial Suit), some are emotional supports (Mary’s two shaggy sheepdogs). There’s even a spectrum from stiffness to shagginess, with the fur coat smack dab in the middle. And the authoritative joke at the center is that “steel” — the hardest and most solid of commodities and the foundation of J.B.’s fortune — turns out to be as airy, volatile, and capricious as the weather.
Leisen’s mise-en-scène and Tetzlaff’s camera gives the objects the full Hollywood treatment.
Sturges wasn’t averse to making objects comic tools in his own films — think of the recording machine in Unfaithfully Yours or the “airport” in Palm Beach Story. But in no other film do objects become equal partners to his verbal wit.
Bonus — Jean Arthur gets the full Tetzlaff treatment.
Bonus #2: The classic Teddy Wilson/Lester Young/Billie Holiday version of Robin-Rainger’s “Easy Living.” Everyone plays it this way now, but I’d love to hear the upbeat swing orchestra version we hear in the movie’s underscore.
Bonus #3: One of my favorite versions of the tune is by Zoot Sims on his For Lady Day album (1978). It’s not as chipper as the one in the movie, but it’s more cheerful than most.