Jane Austen's favorite novelist: Fanny Burney

...There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them...."And what are you reading. Miss ——?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady; while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.— "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;" or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

—Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Ch. V

Two of the three books extolled in this passage were written by Frances Burney, known to family, friends, and the general public as Fanny.* Fanny Burney's books were not only admired by Austen, but clearly had a strong influence on Austen's own writing. Even the praise of novels quoted above may be modelled on a passage in Burney's Cecilia (1782):

The next morning, Cecilia took care to fill up her time more advantageously...: she got together her books, arranged them to her fancy, and secured to herself, for the future occupation of her leisure hours, the exhaustless fund of entertainment which reading, that richest, highest, and noblest source of intellectual enjoyment, perpetually affords.

—Fanny Burney, Cecilia, Bk. I, Ch. IV

Like Austen, in her teens and early twenties Fanny Burney wrote for the amusement of herself and her sisters and brothers. Her first published novel, Evelina, became an overnight sensation when it was issued anonymously in 1778. Written as a series of letters exchanged mainly between the heroine and the man she considers to be her father, the Rev. Arthur Villars, Evelina recounts the experiences of a naïve young woman as she enters the social world of London and its satellite resort towns. Over the course of the novel Evelina repeatedly finds herself placed in awkward, embarrassing, and even perilous situations by aggressive and importunate men. Their actions expose her not only to feelings of chagrin, but to social disgrace.

This is also the situation of Catherine Morland, the heroine of Austen's Northanger Abbey (written in 1798-99, revised in 1817, and published posthumously in 1818). While being introduced to the world of balls and assemblies in the fashionable resort of Bath, the young Catherine becomes the object of unwelcome romantic attentions from the boastful and annoyingly persistent John Thorpe, who also tries to sabotage her romantic prospects with other men.

Later, Catherine is invited to spend time at Northanger Abbey, the family estate of the Tilneys. It turns out—spoiler alert!—that the family patriarch, General Tilney, thinks that Catherine is a rich heiress, would be a suitable match for his son Henry, and is trying to throw them together as much as possible.

This echoes the plot of Burney's second novel, Cecilia. Cecilia is in truth a rich heiress, not just thought to be one, and she winds up living with one of her guardians, the manipulative and fortune-seeking Mr. Harrel. Harrel goes to great lengths to arrange her marriage with his wealthy friends (who are also his creditors). In both cases, the home of an older man turns out not to be the safe refuge that the heroine once believed it to be.

Some other possible influences of Fanny Burney on Jane Austen:

• Evelina is written in the form of letters exchanged among the characters; Austen's first attempts at writing novels were also in epistolary form: Lady Susan (written in 1794, when Austen was 19), Elinor and Marianne (the first version of Sense and Sensibility, written in 1795), and probably First Impressions (the first version of Pride and Prejudice, written in 1796-97).
  
  
• In Evelina, the kindly Rev. Villars is persuaded by his friend Lady Howard to allow his ward to visit London to "see something of the world" (Vol. I, Letter III). Despite his misgivings, Villars allows Evelina to accept Lady Howard's invitation. But after she experiences a series of misadventures he comes to regret his choice: "Oh my child! that I had not permitted the journey! My judgment always opposed it, but my resolution was not proof against persuasion" (Vol. II, Letter XXIX).
  
  In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bennet is firm in his opposition to Lydia's proposed trip to Brighton—until an invitation arrives from Mrs. Forster, the wife of the captain of the regiment that will be quartered there. Elizabeth, the voice of his conscience, urges him to prevent the trip, but Mr. Bennet decides that it will be a harmless way for Lydia to "expos[e] herself in some public place" (Ch LXI). Of course, Mr. Bennet comes to repent his leniency; as he tells Elizabeth, "No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame" (Ch. XLVIII).
  
  
• "...chancing herself to be born of a noble and ancient family, she thinks proper to be of opinion that birth and virtue are one and the same thing. She has some good qualities, but they rather originate from pride than principle, as she piques herself upon being too high born to be capable of an unworthy action, and thinks it incumbent upon her to support the dignity of her ancestry." Pride and Prejudice's Lady Catherine de Bourgh? No: it's a description of Evelina's Mrs. Beaumont (Vol. III, Letter III).
  
  
• And Austen may have taken the very title of her second published novel from the final chapter of Cecilia: "'The whole of this unfortunate business,' said Dr Lyster, 'has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE...[I]f to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination'" (Bk. X, Ch. X).

Burney was of the generation that preceded Austen's, and so her books adhere to certain conventions of the sentimental novel. Characters are occasionally "thunderstruck" by one another's utterances, or make ardent declarations of their feelings. During a visit to the country estate of the Delvile family, Cecilia is caught outside during a violent thunderstorm. Mortimer Delvile, for whom Cecilia feels something more than just friendship, runs out to help her back to the house. Cecilia has been unsure whether young Delvile reciprocates her feelings. But under the stress and anxiety of the storm, and at his urging, she leans on his arm. "Delvile, with an emotion he seemed to find wholly irrepressible, passionately exclaimed, 'Sweet lovely burden! O why not thus for ever!'" (Bk. VI, Ch. III) Well, that's one uncertainty removed.

The occasional emotional effusion aside, Burney's books share the same kind of clear-eyed view of the hypocrises, trivialities and constraints of the social world that distinguishes Austen's novels. Here is Cecilia finding herself trapped next to a dinner companion she has been trying to avoid: "Cecilia with pain kept her seat, and with vexation reflected upon the necessity she was under of passing so large a portion of her time in company to which she was so extremely averse" (Bk. II, Ch. V.).

This is a dilemma that seems very modern; and if one of the pleasures of reading Fanny Burney is to be immersed in the social mores of the distant 18th century, another (as it is with Austen) is to discover just how contemporary her characters can seem.

Update 29 Apr 2014: A description of Mrs. Delvile, from Cecilia, Book VI, Ch. I:

Very few families visited at the castle, and fewer still had their visits returned. The arrogance of Mr. Delvile had offended all the neighbouring gentry, who could easily be better entertained than by receiving instructions of their own inferiority, which however readily they might allow, was by no means so pleasant a subject as to recompense them for hearing no other. And if Mr. Delvile was shunned through hatred, his lady no less was avoided through fear; high-spirited and fastidious, she was easily wearied and disgusted, she bore neither with frailty nor folly — those two principal ingredients in human nature! She required, to obtain her favour, the union of virtue and abilities with elegance, which meeting but rarely, she was rarely disposed to be pleased; and disdaining to conceal either contempt or aversion, she inspired in return nothing but dread or resentment; making thus, by a want of that lenity which is the milk of human kindness, and the bond of society, enemies the most numerous and illiberal by those very talents which, more meekly borne, would have rendered her not merely admired, but adored!

...Her own youth had been passed in all the severity of affliction: she had been married to Mr. Delvile by her relations, without any consultation of her heart or her will. Her strong mind disdained useless complaints, yet her discontent, however private, was deep. Ardent in her disposition, and naturally violent in her passions, her feelings were extremely acute, and to curb them by reason and principle had been the chief and hard study of her life. The effort had calmed, though it had not made her happy. To love Mr. Delvile she felt was impossible; proud without merit, and imperious without capacity, she saw with bitterness the inferiority of his faculties, and she found in his temper no qualities to endear or attract: yet she respected his birth and his family, of which her own was a branch, and whatever was her misery from the connection, she steadily behaved to him with the strictest propriety.

In Fanny Burney's diary for March 15, 1782, she wrote, "I meant in Mrs. Delvile to draw a great, but not a perfect character; I meant, on the contrary, to blend upon paper, as I have frequently seen blended in life, noble and rare qualities with striking and incurable defects. I meant also, to shew how the greatest virtues and excellences may be totally obscured by the indulgence of violent passions and the ascendancy of favourite prejudices."

In a letter to Fanny dated "Thursday, [April?] 25, 1782," Hester Thrale wrote, "Upon my honour then, my dear, I have not said half of what my heart is full. The Delviles, since I wrote last, efface every thing else. When I read the lady's character in my own dressing-room, I catch myself looking at my mother's picture every moment; yours is so like her in many things."

Update 21 September 2014: For other posts about the books mentioned by Austen in that famous Northanger Abbey passage, please see:

Jane Austen and Cecilia: A personal connection?
Sensibility and sense: Camilla and Jane Austen
Crossing boundaries: Gender, race, and colonialism in Belinda

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* The third title is Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801).

Rita Hayworth and Raj Kapoor

A few nights ago my partner and I watched Down To Earth (1947), a musical sequel to Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). The title Down To Earth is apt: the movie is indeed kept firmly earthbound by its inert leading man, Larry Parks, who couldn't sing or dance. However, the real star of the movie is Rita Hayworth in all her Technicolor glory. She was then at the peak of her popularity, just coming off the triumph of Gilda (1946), and having a few years earlier starred opposite Fred Astaire in You'll Never Get Rich (1941) and You Were Never Lovelier (1942), and opposite Gene Kelly in Cover Girl (1944). As her partnering with Astaire and Kelly suggests Hayworth certainly could dance, although in most of her movies, including this one, her singing voice was dubbed by Anita Ellis.

In Down To Earth Hayworth plays the muse Terpsichore, goddess of dance. She's offended by Broadway director Danny Miller (Parks) and his comic musical about two Air Force pilots who crash-land on Mt. Parnassus and then have to fend off the advances of the man-hungry Muses. So she descends from Parnassus, joins the cast of the show, and tries to change it to make it suitably reverent, with dismal results.

Terpsichore's complaint about Miller's original version of the musical is that it portrays the Muses in an unflattering light. You be the judge: here is the play's (and the movie's) first number, "The Nine Muses":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOjNd0uLxLo

In this play-within-the-movie, Terpsichore is portrayed by Adele Jergens and voiced by the amazing Kay Starr. By the way, the red-haired pilot is Marc Platt.

This number segues into a scene on Mount Parnassus, where the real Muses have gathered to hear Terpsichore's complaints. And this is where I began to notice some visual parallels between Down to Earth and Raj Kapoor's Awāra (1951).

As I showed in an earlier post on Awāra, it has many parallels to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel, including Raj's central dream / vision / nightmare of heaven and hell. That sequence also seems to draw on Down to Earth for some of its imagery.

There's the man prostrated on the steps of the goddesses' temple:

Awāra

Down to Earth

There's the vision of the temple among the clouds:

Even some of the choreographic gestures seem similar:

Awara, despite the occasional dissent from carping critics like me, has become one of the most acclaimed films in Hindi cinema. Down To Earth has followed a reverse trajectory: although a hit at the time, it has faded into relative obscurity. But even though its script and leading man are weak, Down To Earth is worth seeing for its musical numbers (by Doris Fisher with lyrics by Allan Roberts), for its savage Martha Graham parody, and especially for Hayworth, who transcends the material through sheer star power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR4I-g7z-0c

My Life in Middlemarch

"We have often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to the task of the biographer—that when some great or good personage dies....we could have a real 'Life,' setting forth briefly and vividly the man’s inward and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear the meaning which his experience has for his fellows....But the conditions required for the perfection of life writing—personal intimacy, a loving and poetic nature which sees the beauty and the depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which seizes characteristic points and renders them with lifelike effect—are seldom found in combination."

—George Eliot, "Carlyle’s Life of Sterling"

The conditions required for the perfection of life-writing are fully met in Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch (Crown Publishers, 2014). It's a record of the changing meanings that George Eliot's Middlemarch has held for Mead as she has reread it over the course of her life. It's also a concise and highly compelling biography of Eliot, a description of the creation and reception of her great novel, and a frank and moving account of Mead's life and experience as it has been reflected in and informed by Middlemarch.

Eliot lived a remarkable life: she was a public intellectual in an era where the home was considered to be women's proper sphere and silence her proper state. Scandalously, Eliot lived openly with a married man (the writer and editor George Henry Lewes), and took his given name as part of her pseudonym. (Blanche Williams, a biographer of George Eliot, has speculated that the second part of her pseudonym is also a tribute to Lewes: "To L—I owe it.")

As Mead writes about her lifelong relationship with Eliot's masterpiece,

"Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows....This kind of book becomes part of our own experience, and a part of our own endurance." (p. 16)

My Life in Middlemarch is essential reading for lovers of Eliot's great novel, but also for those, like Mead (and myself), for whom books have been a crucial element of their "self-fashioning." It's also essential for those looking back from the vantage point of middle age at their young adulthood and wondering at how little temporal and emotional distance seems to separate them from their 20-year-old selves. Like Middlemarch itself, My Life in Middlemarch is a book to reread and treasure for its vision of "the beauty and the depth of familiar things."

Pride and Prejudice (1940)

I've long been skeptical about the 1940 MGM Pride and Prejudice with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier—the glossy classic Hollywood treatment just seemed wrong for Jane Austen. And the 1995 BBC adaptation with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth is so good that I haven't been eager to seek out other versions.

But lately my partner and I have been seeing a lot of films from the 1930s and 1940s, including Mrs. Miniver (1942), which featured Garson in the title role as a stalwart wife and mother trying to hold her family together during the Blitz. Garson was wonderful in that role, and it made me curious about her Elizabeth Bennet.

Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet

My misgivings about the MGM Pride and Prejudice weren't misplaced, but Garson is almost reason enough to watch it. She's a bit mature for the role of Elizabeth: she was in her mid-30s at the time of filming, while in the novel Elizabeth reluctantly tells Lady Catherine that she is "not one-and-twenty." Many actresses can successfully play characters a decade or more younger than their actual age: Jean Arthur played 20-something ingenues well into her forties, and in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice Julia Sawalha does a brilliantly convincing job as the 15-year-old Lydia Bennet (although Sawalha was actually older than Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth). It's not only Garson's looks that are a bit too mature for Elizabeth, though, but her characterization—Ehle captures more of her vulnerability and uncertainty. Even so, Garson is highly enjoyable in the role, conveying all of Elizabeth's intelligence, wit, and kindness (and of course, she has many of the best lines).

Laurence Olivier as Darcy

The other key role in Pride and Prejudice is, of course, Mr. Darcy. And on the basis of his smoldering Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1940), Laurence Olivier would seem to be perfect for the role. But while he captured Darcy's fundamental shyness as well as his arrogance, I wanted more evidence of the passions under all that aristocratic composure. Olivier plays the role with a coolness that at times seems to border on detachment.

Edmund Gwenn as Mr. Bennet

The rest of the mixed cast of North American and British actors is generally good, although none of the other Bennet daughters looks the age of her character either. Maureen O'Sullivan, the adventursome Jane Parker in the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies, is cast against type as the reserved Jane Bennet, although she is scarcely believable as Elizabeth's older sister. And Ann Rutherford, Scarlett O'Hara's flirtatious sister Carreen in Gone With the Wind (1939), plays the flirtatious Lydia. Edmund Gwenn is an excellent Mr. Bennet, and Mary Boland a suitably annoying Mrs. Bennet (although again, she's a bit too old—she could be the girls' grandmother).

Mary Boland as Mrs. Bennet

If you poke around online you'll discover that the costumes come in for a great deal of criticism, and indeed (especially for the women) they're far out of period. The novel was published in 1813, but full skirts with layers of crinoline date from the 1830s at the earliest, as do enormous puffed sleeves. And the absurd dinner-plate bonnets depicted in the film are a Hollywood version of those worn by actresses onstage to keep their faces unshadowed by stage lighting; they would never have been allowed near the heads of women who wanted to appear respectable (or avoid looking ridiculous). The fashions of Jane Austen's day were much simpler:

Jane's niece Fanny Knight; watercolor by Jane's sister Cassandra (ca. 1810)

But the variable accents of the cast and the out-of period or inauthentic costumes can be forgiven. Where this version really fails is in Aldous Huxley and Jane Murfin's script, adapted from a play based on Austen's novel by Helen Jerome. It's at least one layer of adaptation too many. While it's to be expected that compressing a 350-page novel into a film with a 2-hour running time requires major cuts, some of the missing scenes are critical—for example, there's no visit to Pemberley, the moment in the novel when Elizabeth begins to view Darcy differently.

But worse than what's missing is what's changed: there are scenes with no counterpart in the novel, alterations of the plot, and modifications of the characters. The changes are most notable in the actions and character of Lady Catherine de Bourgh (Edna May Oliver in one of her last roles), and they have implications that radically shift the story. There's no way to discuss these without giving away the ending, so be forewarned that spoilers follow.

First, the changes in plot: In her interview with Elizabeth towards the end of the movie, Lady Catherine claims to be able, as the trustee of her sister's estate, to "strip Mr. Darcy of every shilling he has." In the novel this is not a possibility, nor is it a claim ever made by Lady Catherine. Also, the revelation to Elizabeth (and us) of Mr. Darcy's role in Lydia's marriage to Wickham comes from Lady Catherine during this interview, and not (as in the novel) from the thoughtless Lydia.

After her interview with Elizabeth, Lady Catherine goes out to her carriage, where (in another departure from the novel) it turns out that Darcy is waiting. She tells him,

Edna May Oliver as Lady Catherine

What?! Lady Catherine approves of Elizabeth as a match for her nephew? The implication is that the interview was intended as a test by Lady Catherine (and perhaps Darcy, who seems to have had advance knowledge of it) to see if Elizabeth is fortune-hunting. It also implies that Lady Catherine's revelation of Darcy's role in forcing Wickham to marry Lydia was intended as a signal to Elizabeth of Darcy's continuing romantic interest in her—again, perhaps with Darcy's foreknowledge if not outright collusion.

This utterly changes the meaning of the scene and the character of Lady Catherine (so splendidly portrayed by Barbara Leigh-Hunt in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice), not to mention Darcy himself. She and Darcy become calculating co-conspirators sounding out Elizabeth about her feelings (and giving her a strategic nudge or two). Needless to say, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the characters created by Austen.

In Chapter 8 of Pride and Prejudice Austen has Darcy remark of women's romantic stratagems, "Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable." To which I'll only add that the word applies as well to those who apparently felt that their inspirations improved on those of Jane Austen.

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.