Easy Living

Easy Living (1937)

It's dizzy - it's daffy, It's cockeyed - it's laughy!

J.B. Ball, a rich financier, gets fed up with his free-spending family. He takes his wife's just-bought (very expensive) sable coat and throws it out the window, it lands on poor hard-working girl Mary Smith. But it isn't so easy to just give away something so valuable, as he soon learns.

Date of release
1937-07-16
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (71)
Runtime
1h 28m
Genres
Comedy, Romance
Director
Mitchell Leisen

Casting

Interesting facts

Easy Living is a 1937 American screwball comedy film, directed by Mitchell Leisen, written by Preston Sturges from a story by Vera Caspary, and starring Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, and Ray Milland. Many of the supporting players became part of Sturges's regular stock company of character actors in his subsequent films.

Production

Preston Sturges had signed a deal with Paramount in 1936, and Easy Living was his first script writing assignment for them.

"the original story, by the Hollywood leftist Vera Caspary, had Mary steal the coat" - J. Hoberman, The New York Times

Although putatively based on a story by Vera Caspary, Sturges in fact supposedly kept almost nothing of it except the fur coat. When a studio executive rejected the script because "1936 was not the time for comedies", Sturges took the script directly to Mitchell Leisen, of which Sturges said "going to a director over the head of my producer was not a sagacious move".

Preston based the Hotel Louis on the Waldorf Towers, which was a financial flop when it first opened.

Adolphe Menjou was to have been in the cast of Easy Living, but was forced to withdraw due to illness. The minor surgery of director Leisen caused production to be postponed a week to April 5, 1937.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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