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Whistle Stopper - Easy Living (Universal Cinema Classics)
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List Price: $14.98
Our Price: $8.22
Your Save: $ 6.76 ( 45% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, Ray Milland
Directed By: Mitchell Leisen
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: DVD
Brand: UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOME ENTERTAIN.
EAN: 0025193299123
Format: Color
Label: Universal Studios
Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Universal Studios
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2008-04-22
Running Time: 89
Studio: Universal Studios
Theatrical Release Date: 1937-07-07
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Easy Living
Comment: Easy LIving is a fun and unconventional film that is typical of Jean Arthur. I love her.
Customer Rating:
Summary: finally!
Comment: I've been waiting for years for this movie to come out in DVD. It's one of the best classic screwball comedies ever. Jean Arthur, sparkling as always, and a very young Ray Milland are marvelous as is Edward Arnold as the mink-tossing father. The Automat scene is unforgettable. Crammed full of the best character actors of the studio, it's a delight from beginning to end. Plus you have a nice satiric take on the very rich and those that live off of them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Piggy Bank Blindfolds, Confusing Installment Plans and Starving Secretaries Are Here ComicallyKismetted
Comment: Jean Arthur never made a better comedy, and that's saying something! With a surfeit of superb set-pieces, and unequalled writing, Easy Living sashays giddily along the avenues of depression American, spewing forth hilarity like so many wildcat strikes. So miraculous is Sturges' touch he almost seems a comic rhabdomancist, as gushers of comedy break forth in a supernormal even surrealist display of the most ribald imagination possible. Backed with the underrated Mitch Leisen's stylish direction this gem of a film just get's better with age.
Heroine Jean Arthur, down to her last dime, decides to break open her piggybank - but soft-hearted Jean can't do it - she has to first tie a blindfold around the piggy's eyes before smashing it open! Every math teacher in the world will crack up as Edward Arnold, in his usual role as the great man of business, this time as a prominent banker, spends a fruitless five minutes arguing interest payments in the backseat of his limo with shopgirl Jean, who insists she knows arithmetic better than he does and drives him half-crazy when she can't follow his reasoning.
And on and on all leading up to the legendary Automat scene with Ray Milland and Jean Arthur strating chaos at the food automat.
If you like Jean Arthur, or Preston Sturges, and you haven't yet seen this doozy of a screwball comedy - now you can! Don't miss it!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Jean Arthur, Preston Sturges and Mitchell Leisen make a fine, funny screwball comedy
Comment: When an expensive sable coat, thrown from a penthouse balcony by Wall Street tycoon J. B. Ball (Edward Arnold), lands on the head of office clerk Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) while she's riding to work on the top deck of a city bus, we're off on a fine screwball comedy that nails class assumptions to the wall. (The wall being a fabulous suite of the Hotel Louis.) Ball, known as the Bull of Broad Street, threw the coat to spite his extravagant wife. Although it was a mistake, as soon as word gets around that Mary Smith has a coat from J. B. Ball, it's not long before people begin to assume that Mary must be the Bull's mistress. And although she loses her job, almost instantly all those who want a piece of the Bull are falling over themselves to make Mary happy. She winds up in the Hotel Louis in a suite that could only have been dreamed up by Hollywood designers. Clothes and jewels are delivered; a car and chauffeur show up. Mary is mystified by all this, but happily accepts. When she meets a young man who works at the automat, well...we know, of course, that the young man is Johnnie Ball (Ray Milland), son of J. B. Ball, and that he earlier had stormed out of the family mansion determined to prove he could be his own man. It all gets sorted out, but only after a new Depression may get started fueled by more loony assumptions.
Preston Sturges, who wrote the script, brings all the social satire and clever dialogue to Easy Living that he brought to the films he directed and wrote later. Mitchell Leisen, the director, gives the movie a sweet speed. The slapstick moments are like the whipped cream on top of the ice cream sundae. There is a food fight in the automat that is so witty and filled with pratfalls that it makes Animal House look like the work of...hmmm...juveniles.
Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold take above-the-title billing, and they make a compelling set of screwball actors. That Arnold's J. B. Ball is irascible is putting it gently. Yet Arnold makes the tycoon funny and human, and there's no doubt that he really cares for that wife of his. Jean Arthur, of course, makes the movie work. What a one-of-a-kind actress she was, with that air of surprised innocence and that vaguely husky voice with the hint of a squeak now and then. It's worth remembering that Jean Arthur, who was born in 1900, paid her dues in more than 50 silent films, movies with titles like Biff Bang Buddy, Bigger and Better Blondes, and Twisted Triggers. She was 35 when she hit major stardom and stayed at the top through her last movie, Shane, in 1953. That innocent sexiness, acting skill, instant likeability and that voice allowed her to consistently play 10 to 20 years younger than her age. For me, Jean Arthur at 53 and playing Marian Starrett, a woman probably 20 years younger, is the real center of Shane. She gives a deep reality to what all those homesteaders stand for. And she, without saying a word, is what motivates Ladd as Shane to do what he must do. In my opinion, Arthur gives the best performance in the movie. That's something you can say about almost every movie Jean Arthur was in.
And let's not forget some fine character actors who help make Easy Living as funny as it is. Among them is Mary Nash as the Bull's wife, who really does love J. B. (as he does her). By the end of the movie we like them both a lot; Luis Alberni as Mr. Louis Louis of the Hotel Louis, who is energetically ethnic; Franklin Pangborn as Van Buren, the prissy (of course) proprietor of an exclusive hat shop; William Demarest as Wallace Whistling, gossip reporter; Esther Dale as the Bull's unimpressed and decidedly matronly secretary; and Robert Greig as Graves, the portly, imperturbable butler in the Ball household. They all have a chance to shine, and shine they do.
Easy Living doesn't have a pristine DVD transfer, but it looks fine. The only extra is a two-minute disposable introduction by Turner Classic Movie's Robert Osborne.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Goofy Screwball Treat!
Comment: This is a delight of the genre with a story allowing for characters that the audience can heartily enjoy. Other reviewers have described it well. I prefer it to most of the better known screwball comedies as it's a little less predictable than I expected.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Of all the screenplays Preston Sturges wrote for Paramount before becoming the greatest comic director of his generation, 1937's Easy Living seems the most like something he would have filmed himself--a satirical fable about chance, class, and the absurdity of the American dream. Jean Arthur is a New York secretary riding to work atop a double-decker bus when a fur coat miraculously descends from the sky and settles on her shoulders. The fur, however, has not dropped from Olympus but from the hand of a millionaire (Edward Arnold) who has just tossed it from a nearby roof to punish his wife. But as if it were a magic fleece (the mythical reference is almost certainly intended by the erudite Sturges), it makes its wearer invincible, conferring an aura of prosperity, celebrity, and power on the previously average working girl. No folk tale is complete without a prince: Sturges's is the millionaire's son, Ray Milland, who is trying to pass as an apprentice stockbroker. Directed with a light, elegant touch by Mitchell Leisen, the film lacks the crazy energy it would have had under Sturges's own hand, but this remains one of the great screwball comedies (in a year that also saw The Awful Truth and Nothing Sacred). --Dave Kehr
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