Rent Easy Living (1937)

Fascinating depression era comedy. - Easy Living review by Steve

This comedy scripted by Preston Sturges and directed by Mitchell Leisen, was clearly imagined under the influence of Ernst Lubitsch. Wall Street banker JB Ball (Edward Arnold) enraged by his family's profligacy, throws his wife's new $58000 mink coat over the side of his Manhattan apartment and it lands on working girl Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) on her way to the office, knocking her out of the orbit of her ordinary struggle.

 Mary  loses her job for the moral improprieties she is presumed guilty of to get the coat. But eventually, because she is judged to be the mistress of JB Ball, the luxury traders of the Big Apple lavish her with valuables when they draw the same conclusion. By chance (!) Mary ends up giving a roof to the slumming son of Mr. Ball Jr. (Ray Milland) in her penthouse suite. Together they unwittingly unbalance the stock exchange, destablising his father's financial empire.

 It's a film that views the privileges of the rich in the context of the the depression. And Jean Arthur as an emissary of the poor improbably accidentally gifted the advantages of the wealthy is really very good. Her hunger in the early scenes is palpable, a bewildered everygirl who is carried far away by the tide of fate. She never feels fake and eclipses the faintly drawn support characters.

 There's a remarkable scene in an automated restaurant where Mary meets Ball Jr. working as a waiter , with Ms. Smith unable to afford even this cheap food, and a poor man is washing in a glass of water. The film does ask us to wonder how such extremes of means can co-exist. Ball Sr. really does treat everyone else in his kingdom with contempt. But the social comment is lightly applied within the context of a charming and entertaining farce.