Favorites of 2010-2019: Movies and TV

Cartoon by E. Black (caption slightly modified). Image source: New Yorker

It's been ten years since I began posting my year-end lists of the favorite movies, TV, music, live performances and books I experienced in the previous 12 months. Over the past decade I listed 35 narrative films from countries other than India, 27 films from India, 15 documentaries, 18 TV series, 49 recordings, 57 live performances, 39 works of fiction, and 32 works of non-fiction.

While I tend to be more interested in planning my next adventure than in reviewing past pleasures, I've gone back through all of the favorites lists of the past decade to nominate my favorites of the favorites, 2010-19.

One friend calls my lists "idiosyncratic." I'm sure it was meant kindly, but in fact it's the entire point. These are not intended to be "best-of" lists, nor are they driven by the commercial considerations that motivate most year-end listmaking. The movies, music, books, etc., that make my favorites lists are simply those I found most personally engaging in the previous year, whenever the works themselves were produced. They can be a universally acclaimed masterpiece, a hidden gem, or just something that perfectly matched my mood at the time. Your tastes may (and probably will, and probably should) vary.

NARRATIVE FILMS

Fully half of my ten favorite narrative films seen in the past decade are in languages other than English (and as usual Indian films are in their own category), and eight were produced more than half a century ago. Just missing the list: Her (2013), Mysteries of Lisbon (2010), and Today's Special (2009). Apologies to Jean Arthur, René Clair and Ernst Lubitsch, who were limited to one film apiece: otherwise Too Many Husbands (1940), Sous les toits de Paris (1930), and One Hour With You (1932) would also have been included.

À nous la liberté (Give us freedom! 1931): René Clair's great comic masterpiece, in which two free spirits try to escape the conformist, coercive worlds of prison, work and school.

Trouble in Paradise (1932): "The Lubitsch touch"—witty, sophisticated comedy—is brought to a peak of perfection in this classic pre-Code romantic triangle.

Libeled Lady (1936): Speaking of witty and sophisticated comedy, it's delivered here with sparkling timing by a quartet of glamorous stars: Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, William Powell and a luminous Myrna Loy.

Remember the Night (1940): Four years before they appeared as the fatally attracted couple in Billy Wilder's classic Double Indemnity, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck co-starred in this compelling Preston Sturges-penned Christmas noir.

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941): One of the best of Jean Arthur's comedies (which is saying a great deal), The Devil and Miss Jones offers heartfelt emotion and a pointed social message.

Tokyo Story (Tōkyō Monogatari, 1953): Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece of restraint in which details of the characters' lives and emotions are slowly unveiled, as in a great novel.

A Report on the Party and Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966): A party that everyone is forced to attend becomes a barbed analogy for political life under Communism in this brilliant parable by Czech New Wave filmmaker Ester Krumbachová.

War and Peace (Voyna i mir, 1967): Epic in every sense, Sergei Bondarchuk's four-film adaptation of Tolstoy's great novel sets the characters' private dramas of sacrifice, betrayal, and reconciliation against the public catastrophe of Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

Frantz (2016): Based on Ernst Lubitsch's Broken Lullaby (1932), François Ozon's Frantz follows the deepening emotional connection between a German war widow and the French soldier wracked with guilt over his role in her husband's death.

Julieta (2016): In deciding the final entry for this list, I thought about which film I'd be most eager to rewatch. It was no contest. As with most Pedro Almodóvar movies, Julieta (based on Alice Munro short stories) is less about the twists and turns of the plot than about a series of emotion-packed moments rendered with the hyper-real acuity of a dream.

DOCUMENTARIES

Out of my 15 favorite documentaries first seen in 2010 or after I've selected five. Just missing inclusion were three performing arts documentaries, Every Little Step (2008), First Position (2011), and Pina (2011).

Joni Mitchell: A Woman of Heart and Mind (2003): Susan Lacy's documentary traces Joni Mitchell's life and work from her mid-1960s beginnings singing as Joni Anderson in Calgary coffeehouses, through her 1970s heyday and her subsequent fall from pop music favor. Even if you think you aren't interested in Mitchell or her music, her determination to explore her own path in the face of what seem at times to be insurmountable difficulties is compelling.

Finding Vivian Maier (2013) tells the fascinating and wildly improbable story of John Maloof's discovery of Maier's photographic archive at a storage space auction, his attempts to trace her identity and history, and his bringing her work to well-deservedfame. And it is filled with Maier's striking and sometimes unsettling photographs.

I Am Not Your Negro (2016): Drawn primarily from James Baldwin's writings on the 1960s civil rights movement, Raoul Peck's documentary speaks just as urgently to the present moment. Essential viewing.

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years (2016): In a matter of months in 1963 and 1964, to their own disbelief, the Beatles went from playing basement bars to sold-out stadiums filled with tens of thousands of screaming fans. It's an amazing story that never gets old, and Ron Howard lets us watch events unfold through footage shot at the time. Pure pleasure.

Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (2018): This documentary captures Joan Jett's onstage energy, her fierce integrity (which has survived four and a half decades in the music industry), and her delightfully raspy speaking and singing voice. A must for fans; if you aren't one, watch this movie and you will be.

TV SERIES

Unsurprisingly all of my favorites-of-favorites TV series are related to literary works. Just missing inclusion on the list were The Barchester Chronicles (1982), Daniel Deronda (2002), and Victoria (2016).

Middlemarch (1994): Adapted by Andrew Davies, this BBC series features virtually every major incident in George Eliot's great novel of marital disillusion, a wonderful cast (including E & I favorite Rufus Sewell), and of course fabulous costumes and locations.

Wives and Daughters (1999): Another Andrew Davies adaptation, this time of Elizabeth Gaskell's best novel. Molly Gibson (the ethereal Justine Waddell) is a young woman who must deal with her unpleasant new stepmother (Francesca Annis) and her beautiful but emotionally manipulative new stepsister (Keeley Hawes). The cast also includes Michael Gambon, Barbara Flynn, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, and Rosamund Pike.

Slings & Arrows (2003-2006) follows the fortunes of a theater company that bears a striking (but surely coincidental!) resemblance to the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Each season centers on the production of a different Shakespeare play: Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. But the other productions of the festival and the barely controlled backstage chaos provide an authentic backdrop for the mainstage drama.

Cranford and Return to Cranford (2007-2009): These Heidi Thomas-scripted Elizabeth Gaskell adaptations focus on the inhabitants of the fictional town of Cranford, and the challenges to their traditions posed by new social, political and economic changes. Dame Judi Dench heads an ensemble cast of excellent British actors such as Imelda Staunton, Barbara Flynn, Claudie Blakely, Lesley Manville, Jim Carter, Michael Gambon, and the serenely radiant Julia Sawalha.

Lark Rise To Candleford (2008-2011) is the story of a young rural woman (Olivia Hallinan) learning to make her way in the wider world; the contrast between hamlet and town offers a microcosm of the social, political, economic and technological changes occurring in England in the late 19th century.

Other Favorites of 2010-2019:

• Bollywood and beyond
• Music
• Live performances 
• Books

Best Picture? I don't think so

The 91st Academy Awards will be broadcast on February 24, 2019, and I doubt that I'll be watching. Not only is the whole self-congratulatory exercise overlong, tacky and often boring (except when it's a train wreck), but the influence on the awards of campaigning and of box office success or failure has meant that the Academy has a pretty terrible track record when it comes to honoring cinematic achievement picking winners.

Best Picture has been a category where particularly poor choices have been made. Inspired by this Guardian article, for each of the nine decades of sound films I've chosen a single year (generally among several) in which the Best Picture winner was clearly the wrong film.

Best Picture winner of 1938: You Can't Take It With You, written by Robert Riskin and directed by Frank Capra, based on the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart.

You Can't Take It With You has a great cast, including Jean Arthur, James Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore. But as I wrote in The Films of Jean Arthur, "A major mistake made by Capra and Riskin is to marginalize the winsome Arthur and Stewart, who disappear for long stretches while screen time is taken up by the 'zany' (i.e. gratingly irritating) antics of the other family members."

The film that should have won: Grand Illusion, written by Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak, directed by Renoir.*

Perhaps the greatest anti-war film ever made, Renoir's La Grande Illusion is set during World War I but is clearly intended to sound the alarm about the conflagration about to engulf the world. A group of French prisoners is held in a German camp; while confined there, the aristocratic French officer Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) discovers that he has more in common with the German commandant von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) than he does with his own enlisted men. And both men come to recognize that their code of military honor has become outdated in an age of mass slaughter.

Best Picture winner of 1944: Going My Way, written by Frank Butler and Frank Cavett, directed by Leo McCarey.

I'm not an enemy of sentiment—I think either The Bishop's Wife or Miracle on 34th Street would have been a better Best Picture of 1947 than Gentleman's Agreement—so I can't be too curmudgeonly about Going My Way. After all, it's got opera star Risë Stevens playing, well, an opera star, and Bing Crosby playing a priest whose laid-back fatherliness is just what his new parish's dead-end kids need. Jazz critic and Crosby biographer Gary Giddins calls it "funny and resonant." And, no doubt, immensely comforting for home-front audiences. But it wasn't the best picture of 1944.

The film that should have won: Double Indemnity, written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, directed by Wilder, based on the novel by James M. Cain.

Double Indemnity features the doubly indelible performances of Fred MacMurray as an unscrupulous insurance salesman and Barbara Stanwyck as a seductive siren; together they plot to murder her inconvenient husband and, of course, collect the insurance. It's also formally inventive, narrated in flashback over the course of a single night by MacMurray's character. Infidelity, murder, betrayal: far from offering comfort, Wilder's ink-black noir is distinctly unsettling.

Double Indemnity was hardly the only film noir overlooked by the Academy in the 1940s. If you were putting together a noir festival you'd undoubtedly also include The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Gilda (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Out of the Past (1947), and Gun Crazy (1949). You can count on one finger the number of those films that were nominated for Best Picture (The Maltese Falcon, which, together with Citizen Kane, lost to How Green Was My Valley).

Best Picture winner of 1958: Gigi, written by Alan Lerner with music by Frederick Loewe, directed by Vincent Minnelli, based on the novel by Colette.

Even for someone who is generally a fan of movie musicals, Gigi can be hard to watch, particularly when Maurice Chevalier's smarmy Honoré is onscreen (yes, this is the film with "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"). The plot, such as it is, turns on whether the virginal but hardly innocent young Gigi (Leslie Caron) will agree to become the mistress of Honoré's nephew Gaston (Louis Jourdan). The sexual politics of the movie must have been jarringly anachronistic even in 1958. Like Chevalier, this film hasn't aged well.

The film that should have won: Vertigo, written by Samuel Taylor, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the novel D'Entre les Morts by Boileau-Narcejac.

In the first post on this blog I wrote that Vertigo, Hitchcock's masterpiece of obsession, is a film that "becomes richer with every viewing." It features Hitchcock's swirling, disorienting camera; Bernard Herrmann's sweeping, powerful score; James Stewart's tormented detective Scotty Ferguson; and Kim Novak's brilliant double role as the coolly erotic Madeline Elster and the pleading, insecure Judy Barton. On its release a box office failure, in 2012 it was chosen in the Sight and Sound Critics' Poll as the greatest film ever made.

As is well known, Hitchcock was regularly snubbed by the Academy. Among his other films from the 1950s are Strangers on a Train (1951), Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), To Catch a Thief (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and North By Northwest (1959). Remarkably, none of these films (including Vertigo) was nominated for Best Picture.

Best Picture winner of 1968: Oliver!, written by Vernon Harris with music by Lionel Bart and John Green, directed by Carol Reed, based on the stage musical by Bart and the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

Yes, it's tuneful and has charming urchins, but that doesn't make it the best film released in 1968.

The film that should have won: 2001: A Space Odyssey, written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, directed by Kubrick.

A small team of astronauts is sent on an expedition to the outer planets. Because the trip will take years, most of the crew has been placed in suspended animation. But the HAL-9000 computer running the ship has been given secret instructions to alter the ship's mission, and cannot let mere human lives interfere. . .Kubrick's film was the first to depict the possibilities of space exploration with scientific accuracy. He captured both the wonder and the fear occasioned by the vastness of the cosmos, and our anxieties about the destructive potential of our technologies. 2001 was ranked #2 in the 2012 Sight and Sound Directors' Poll of the greatest films of all time.

Best Picture winner of 1979: Kramer vs. Kramer, written and directed by Robert Benton, based on the novel by Avery Corman.

Misogyny masquerading as male feminist enlightenment. Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep) abandons her workaholic husband Ted (Dustin Hoffman) and their son Billy (Justin Henry) to "find herself." Over the course of the next year Ted gradually learns how to be a nurturing dad, and even has to take a lower-paying job so that he can have the time to provide care for Billy. (This is not presented as a dilemma that women are routinely compelled to face, but rather as a sign of Ted's moral superiority.) Joanna returns after a year to sue her former husband for custody of Billy, and in court reveals that (although she's been out of the workforce for a decade) she's now earning a higher salary than he is. Awarded custody, Joanna comes to the realization that Ted is a better parent than she can ever be.

The film that should have won: Apocalypse Now, written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, directed by Coppola, based on the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

This film is a famous mess: Marlon Brando (Colonel Kurtz) arrived on set obese and unprepared, Martin Sheen (Captain Willard) suffered a heart attack on location, and the sets were destroyed by a typhoon. Coppola took years to edit the mountains of footage and produced multiple versions of the film. In the version I saw in a repertory theater in the 1980s, Kurtz's compound is obliterated by a massive airstrike as the closing credits roll, one of the most astonishingly violent film sequences I've ever seen. (Apparently Coppola removed this footage from subsequent versions.) The French theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote that Apocalypse Now is "the extension of the war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis." The film was ranked #6 in the 2012 Sight and Sound Directors' Poll of the greatest films of all time.

Best Picture winner of 1989: Driving Miss Daisy, written by Alfred Uhry, directed by Bruce Beresford, based on the play by Uhry.

In 1989 a powerful film about racism and its continuing legacies featuring revered veteran actors was released. Only it wasn't Driving Miss Daisy.

The film that should have won: Do The Right Thing, written and directed by Spike Lee.

An urgent film that grips you from the first moment of the Public-Enemy-fueled title sequence and never lets go, Do The Right Thing addresses racism (of all kinds), tensions in changing communities, and police violence against black men and women. A great cast includes Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Danny Aiello, Bill Nunn (above), John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Roger Guenveur Smith, Martin Lawrence, Samuel Jackson, Rosie Perez and Lee himself. Unfortunately still as relevant as the day it was released, Do The Right Thing is one of the greatest American films of the past 30 years.

Best Picture winner of 1990: Dances with Wolves, written by Michael Blake, directed by Kevin Costner, based on the book by Blake.

A film that attempts to honor Native Americans, but indulges in discredited white savior and noble savage narratives.

The film that should have won: Goodfellas, written by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, directed by Scorsese, based on the book Wiseguy by Pileggi.

The story of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a mob hanger-on who turns informer, Goodfellas is one of Scorsese's best films. The "Do you think I'm funny?" scene, in which a seemingly offhand comment Hill makes to psychotic gangster Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) suddenly becomes a matter of deadly seriousness, is one of several brilliant set pieces in the film. Another is the sequence just before Hill's arrest, as, high on cocaine, he tries to instruct his wife in the making of a Bolognese sauce, manage a collapsing drug deal, and control his paranoia about FBI surveillance (which turns out to be justified). In the 2012 Sight and Sound Directors' Poll, Goodfellas is tied at #48 with Hitchcock's Psycho (1961) and Rear Window (1954), Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955), and Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Best Picture of 1975), among others.

Best Picture winner of 2001: A Beautiful Mind, written by Akiva Goldsman, directed by Ron Howard, based on the book by Sylvia Nasar.

Aussie action hero Russell Crowe as a schizophrenic genius? As you might guess, A Beautiful Mind glamorizes, simplifies and falsifies mathematician John Nash's life story, omitting his bisexuality, his violence towards his wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), and their 1963 divorce (they remarried in 2001). As usual for Hollywood biopics, the film goes for uplift over the actual complexity of the subject's life.

The film that should have won: Mulholland Drive, written and directed by David Lynch.

Set on the fringes of Hollywood, Mulholland Drive is a dreamlike neo-noir that turns nightmarish. Lynch masterfully creates an atmosphere of suspense and dread. Characters are doubled and may exist in each other's dreams or fantasies. As with any David Lynch film the narrative is non-linear and open to multiple interpretations. Mulholland Drive was ranked #28 in the 2012 Sight and Sound Critics' Poll of the greatest films of all time.

Best Picture winner of 2014: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), written by Alejandro Iñárritu and others (did it really take four people to produce this script?), directed by Iñárritu.

An utterly insufferable actors' and director's exercise, Birdman is an attempt to remake John Cassavetes' semi-improvisatory Opening Night (1977) using the pseudo-continuous-take technique of Hitchcock's Rope (1948). Neither the director nor the actors seem to be aware of how annoying narcissistic self-regard, inflated self-importance, and rampant self-pity can be. I defy anyone to sit through this turkey more than once.

The film that should have won: The Grand Budapest Hotel, written and directed by Wes Anderson.

Perhaps based in part on Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal's novel I Served the King of England, Anderson's film features an old hotel, a priceless painting, and a murder mystery set against the violent history of Central Europe in the 20th century. In my list of favorite films seen in 2014, I wrote that the movie, a "matrushka doll of a fairy tale, with its stories within stories, is a visual and narrative delight."

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* Because there was no Best Foreign Language Film award in 1938, Grand Illusion was eligible for Best Picture (and was nominated in that category).

Films of Jean Arthur, part 2

A continuation of Films of Jean Arthur, part 1. This part discusses If You Could Only Cook, Too Many Husbands, The Devil and Miss Jones, The Talk of the Town, and The More The Merrier.

If You Could Only Cook (1935, directed by William Seiter and written by Howard Green and Gertrude Purcell)
By including this movie I'm departing from strict chronological order, but I'm doing so because it may be the original Jean Arthur "sleeping under the same roof" movie. In film after film, her character spends the night (or several) with her main romantic interest. It's a situation that recurs in Easy Living, Too Many Husbands, The Talk of the Town, and The More the Merrier, and it may have begun here.

Auto designer Jim Buchanan (Herbert Marshall), unhappily engaged to a woman he doesn't love (Frieda Inescort) and frustrated by the conservative board of his car company, sits down on a park bench next to recently evicted job-seeker Joan Hawthorne (Jean Arthur). She suggests that they apply for a position she's found in the want ads for a married couple to serve as cook and butler. Needing a break from his harried existence, Buchanan agrees without revealing his identity.

The two pretend to be married and are hired as live-in domestic staff by gangster Mike Rossini (Leo Carrillo). They're given a single room; at night, Jim sleeps on the porch, while Joan takes the bed. Once he thinks Joan is asleep, Jim sneaks out, goes back home and takes lessons from his own butler so that he can do his job convincingly. Rossini, discovering their sleeping arrangements and Jim's nocturnal escapes, thinks that their marriage is in trouble and declares his love for Joan.

This may also be the first Jean Arthur movie where a parody relationship starts to turn into a real one, as Joan and Jim begin to develop feelings for one another. When Jim reluctantly returns to his fiancée and is about to submit to his loveless marriage, Rossini finds a distraught Joan and sends his gang to the church to seek revenge.

This is the kind of movie that Hollywood doesn't, can't, and probably shouldn't make any more: the plot is highly contrived and the characters are deliriously incorrect, with Carrillo and Lionel Stander portraying broad Italian gangster stereotypes. But it's a lot of fun all the same, and the breezy 70-minute running time means that no scene has a chance to overstay its welcome.

Too Many Husbands (1940, directed by Wesley Ruggles and written by Claude Binyon)
Based on the 1923 play Home and Beauty by W. Somerset Maugham, which itself is loosely based on Tennyson's poem "Enoch Arden," Too Many Husbands is like a more daring, gender-reversed version of My Favorite Wife (both films were released in 1940). Vicky and Henry Lowndes (Jean Arthur and Melvyn Douglas) are still basking in the glow from their recent honeymoon when her first husband Bill Cardew (Fred MacMurray) shows up unexpectedly. Lost at sea and presumed dead, he has been stranded on a desert island for the past year, and is outraged to discover that his wife has gotten remarried so quickly—and to his supposed best friend Henry.

While she thinks about what is to be done, Vicky banishes both men from her bedroom and sends them to sleep in the spare room down the hall. Each husband, of course, tries to sneak back into her bed, but even more desperately wants to prevent the other from doing the very same thing. Unusually, there's a double bed in the marital bedroom, as opposed to the two single beds so often and so ludicrously shown in 1940s films:

It's a clever twist on the "sleeping under the same roof" situation that recurs again and again in Arthur's films; that each man is her husband heightens, rather than lessens, the suggestiveness of the situation.

Too Many Husbands features terrific comic performances by the cast, hilarious (and at times amazingly risqué) dialogue, and an ambiguous ending that manages to offer the suggestion of a continuing ménage. Perhaps when it was released the reception of this classic farce was blunted by the looming war and the near-simultaneous release of My Favorite Wife; it's an overlooked gem.

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941, directed by Sam Wood, written by Norman Krasna)
The devil of the title is John Merrick (Charles Coburn in one of his irascible old rich guy roles; he would reprise it in The More the Merrier). Merrick owns "Neeley's" department store on New York's 38th Street (Macy's, of course, was famously located on 34th Street). He decides to combat a unionizing attempt at his store by going undercover as a new employee to ferret out the ringleaders. It doesn't take him long to discover the organizers: they're firebrand Joe O'Brien (Robert Cummings) and his girlfriend, clerk Mary Jones (Jean Arthur).

Through Jones, Merrick also discovers that the workers have many legitimate grievances: long hours, low pay, and overbearing, dictatorial and exploitative managers. He discovers as well a growing affection for clerk Elizabeth Ellis (the lovely Spring Byington), whose grueling schedule barely earns her enough money to feed herself but who selflessly gives the lion's share of her meager lunch to the unwitting Merrick.

With its combination of heartfelt emotion and pointed social message, The Devil and Miss Jones is one of the best of Arthur's comedies. Sure, the final scene rivals the "head and heart" handshake at the end of Fritz Lang's Metropolis for detachment from any recognizable reality of capitalist-labor relations, but if it's reality you're looking for classic Hollywood comedies probably aren't the place to find it. The Devil and Miss Jones imagines a world in which a rich man comes to recognize his immense debt to those who created and sustain his wealth, and that's a fantasy that all of us can appreciate.

The Talk of the Town (1942, directed by George Stevens and written by Dale Van Every, Irwin Shaw and Sidney Buchman)
This is another Jean Arthur movie featuring a paternal matchmaker, with the twist that the matchmaker is also a potential romantic interest for Arthur. Famous law professor Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), seeking a quiet summer place where he can write a book, rents a room in the small town of Lochester in a house owned by the comely teacher Nora Shelley (Arthur). But quiet is elusive. The Lochester mill has burned down, the mill foreman has seemingly died in the fire, and arson by millworker and political activist Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant) is suspected. Dilg, a fugitive from the police, seeks refuge in the home of childhood friend Nora. When Lightcap arrives earlier than expected, Nora must scramble to conceal Dilg and divert Lightcap's suspicions.

This is another movie where Arthur's character spends the night under the same roof with a man (and in this case, two); even more suggestively, she winds up borrowing a pair of Lightcap's pajamas. The next morning, in classic screwball comedy fashion, her house is invaded by her mother, a newspaper reporter and photographer, furniture movers, Dilg's lawyer Sam Yates, police searching for Dilg, and a Western Union man, all before she can change out of her eyebrow-raising sleepwear.

Dilg refuses to leave the house—where could he be safer than in the house of a law school dean?— and so Nora tries to pass him off as her gardener "Joseph." Soon Joseph and Lightcap are engaging in games of chess and discussions of the law, and form a fast friendship. Nora urges Lightcap to take an interest in Dilg's case, but with a possible Supreme Court appointment looming Lightcap is reluctant to play any role in a case that is bound to be controversial.

Will Nora and Dilg reawaken Lightcap's sleeping conscience? Will Lightcap come to realize the true identity of his chess partner? Will Dilg escape the clutches of Lochester's corrupt court system? And will the passionate Dilg or the cerebral, courtly Lightcap win the girl? (Apparently both outcomes were filmed, and the choice left up to preview audiences.)

The Talk of the Town is a charming romantic comedy with a socially-conscious message. The only flaw is that in the second half the intellectual and romantic contest between Lightcap and Dilg tends to pull focus from Nora (although she asserts her right of choice to the very end).

The More the Merrier (1943, directed by George Stevens and written by Richard Flournoy, Lewis R. Foster and Frank Ross, Jean Arthur's husband)
The More the Merrier brings to the fore a subtext found in many of Jean Arthur's comedies, hinted at in the "sleeping under the same roof" trope and made explicit in Too Many Husbands and this film: sex.

In Washington D.C. in what looks to be late summer of 1942 there are key wartime shortages. The first of these is housing, and Connie Milligan (Jean Arthur) is determined to do her part for the war effort by renting out the second bedroom in her four-room apartment. She's looking for a woman, but instead gets Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), an irascible older man who decides to play Cupid despite the fact that Connie is already engaged. Dingle concludes that she needs a new beau, a "high-type, clean-cut, nice young fella."

But the second major wartime shortage is men. Washington has becomes a city of women, and sexual mores are turned on their head: women ogle and whistle at passing men, openly approach them, and blatantly proposition them.

But not Connie. She's still waiting patiently for her fiancé of two years, the milquetoast bureaucrat Charles J. Pendergast (Richard Gaines), to marry her. Perhaps as a result, everything about Connie is wound up tight, from her hairstyle to her clothes to her minute-by-minute morning schedule.

Dingle explodes all of Connie's comfortable routines because he's incapable of following her rules (or anyone's; he loves to quote Farragut's "Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead"). He invites new acquaintance Sergeant Joe Carter (Joel McCrea), an aircraft engineer who is about to be shipped out overseas, to share his half of Connie's apartment—a choice that clearly involves some ulterior motives.

Joe Carter is not a typical screwball comedy hero. He doesn't engage in witty repartée or flirtatious banter and he has no charm of either the roguish or debonair variety. In short, he's Joel McCrea rather than Cary Grant or Clark Gable. But he's tall, broad-shouldered and handsome (enough, anyway), and Connie is young and pretty. (In fact, Arthur was in her early forties, and was older than McCrea by half a decade, but she convincingly plays a character 15 years younger than her actual age).

The movie makes the basis of their attraction explicit as Connie and Joe gradually shed clothes and as she literally lets down her hair: they go from seeing each other in their concealing morning bathrobes, to sunbathing together on the roof, to Connie wearing a négliée in the final scene that's so sheer that it's amazing it got by the censors. The Cole Porter song "What is This Thing Called Love?" plays throughout the film at key moments. One of its lines is "Who can solve its mystery?" but the movie suggests that when two attractive people are involved, there's not really so much mystery.

Dingle takes every opportunity to throw Connie and Joe together and let nature take its course. As in If You Could Only Cook, the couple living together in Connie's cramped apartment is a parody of marriage that Dingle is trying to turn into the real thing. And when their living arrangement becomes known, a quick marriage of convenience followed by an annullment after Joe ships out seems the best way for Joe and Connie to avoid a scandal...

Coburn's performance is widely praised, but for me it's Arthur who makes this film work. She's both funny and moving as she portrays the confusion and tremulous uncertainty of a woman who thought she knew what she wanted, but whose heart winds up overruling her head.

And perhaps that's part of her lasting appeal as a comic actress: in film after film she finds herself going against her better judgment. She's not a remote goddess or a wisecracking dame who is the master of every situation. She's vulnerable and confused, but good-hearted and kind to a fault. She's an ordinary person struggling to do the right thing, even if it lands her in trouble. And that's what makes her so endearing.

Films of Jean Arthur, part 1: Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Easy Living, You Can't Take It With You

Lately we've been having a mini-festival of films from the 1930s and -40s featuring the wonderful comedienne Jean Arthur. Other actresses in the comedies of the period portrayed eccentric socialites (Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard); wisecracking, cynical dames (Barbara Stanwyck); wry, unflappable wives (Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy); or fast-talking working women (Rosalind Russell, Ginger Rogers). In her best roles, Jean Arthur portrayed the sweet-natured, endearing Everywoman Next Door. Her slim, petite frame, rosebud lips and remarkably youthful looks meant that she was able to convincingly play the ingenue well into her forties.

Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936, directed by Frank Capra and written by Robert Riskin)

In the movie that made her a huge star, though, her character was more in the fast-talking Hildy Johnson mold. She plays star reporter Babe Bennett, who masquerades as poor working girl "Mary Dawson" to gain the confidence (and soon, the love) of Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper). Deeds has come to New York from rural Vermont after inheriting $20 million from a rich uncle, and the vultures immediately start to circle. Using "Mary Dawson"'s access to Deeds, Babe writes a series of "hick-comes-to-the-big-city" articles that hold him up to ridicule by highlighting his tuba-playing and other countrified quirks.

Of course, she has a change of heart and begins to fall in love with him (he is Gary Cooper, after all). But Deeds finds out about her deception and, heartbroken, refuses to defend himself when crooked lawyer John Cedar (Douglas Dumbrille) attempts to have him declared unfit to manage the money. Will Babe be able to convince Deeds that her love is true in time to thwart Cedar's plan?

Naïve-but-honest hero confronts the corrupt big city with the aid of a woman who discovers her conscience and stands by her man: the plot of Mr. Deeds provided the template for two later Capra films, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939, with Jean Arthur) and Meet John Doe (1941, with Gary Cooper, and also written by Riskin). Capra won his second Best Director Academy Award for Mr. Deeds, but entertaining as it is I think the two later movies make better use of the basic story.

Easy Living (1937, directed by Mitchell Leisen and written by Preston Sturges)

Banker J.B. Ball (Edward Arnold, later of You Can't Take It With You (1938) and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington), enraged when he discovers that his wife has bought yet another hugely expensive fur coat, throws it out of the window of their palatial apartment—and onto the head (and hat) of Mary Smith (Arthur) on the street below. Ball insists that Mary keep the coat, and buys her a new hat to match. Her new coat and hat lead to the widespread assumption that Mary has become Ball's mistress. Those assumptions get her fired from her job at a boys' magazine and send the stock market plummeting as rival investors try to extract insider information from her. There are also some perks, though: the amazed Mary gets a free stay in the super-luxury Imperial Suite at the Hotel Louis when the owner mistakenly thinks he's ingratiating himself with Ball.

But it's Ball's handsome son John Jr. (Ray Milland) who winds up staying there with Mary after he also loses his job (determined to make his own way in the world, he's been working at the Automat (!)). Of course, the two are soon in love. Will John Jr. rescue his father's financial fortunes and win his approval for the match?

Ball is the first of a long line of wealthy older men who offer Arthur's characters (semi-)paternal attention. And John Jr. is the first in a long line of Arthur's romantic interests who wind up sleeping with her—that is, literally spending the night under the same roof, and in this case, on the same chaise (head to toe):*

It's perfectly chaste. Well, perhaps not perfectly—the sleeping-together setup is sexily suggestive, and John Jr. gives Mary a goodnight kiss that she receives with surprise and evident delight—but it was just chaste enough to satisfy the puritanical Hays Code. This device would later become virtually the entire plot of The More The Merrier (1943).

You Can't Take It With You (1938, directed by Frank Capra and written by Robert Riskin)

This film, based on the hit play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart, won the Best Film and Best Director Academy Awards, but it hasn't aged particularly well (in my opinion, the awards that year should have gone to The Adventures of Robin Hood and its director Michael Curtiz).

Arthur plays Alice Sycamore, the one conventional member of a family full of "charming" (i.e. gratingly irritating) eccentrics. Alice, a stenographer who works for industrialist Anthony Kirby (Edward Arnold), has fallen in love with his son Tony (James Stewart), and he with her (to his parents' dismay). She arranges for her fiancé to bring his highly skeptical father and snobbish society-lady mother (Mary Forbes) over for dinner to meet her family, and of course wants everything to go perfectly. But Tony deliberately brings his parents on the wrong night so that they'll see Alice's family in all their oddball, chaotic reality. Disaster ensues. There's also a subplot in which Tony's father pressures Alice's grandfather (Lionel Barrymore) to sell his house and land so that he can build a massive weapons factory.

A major mistake made by Capra and Riskin is to marginalize the winsome Arthur and Stewart, who disappear for long stretches while screen time is taken up by the "zany" (i.e. gratingly irritating) antics of the other family members. The excellent cast (which includes Spring Byington, later of The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)) can't make up for the script's creaky machinations. Better things were to come.

Next time: Films of Jean Arthur, part 2: If You Could Only Cook, Too Many Husbands, The Devil and Miss Jones, The Talk of the Town, and The More The Merrier

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* John Jr. and Mary actually shower together as well—although it's by accident, and they're fully clothed at the time.