General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Easy Living

Easy Living is a 1937 American screwball comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen, with a screenplay by Preston Sturges from a story by Vera Caspary, starring Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold, and Ray Milland. Produced and released by Paramount Pictures on 16 July 1937, it follows a working girl whose life is upended when a banker's discarded $58,000 sable coat falls from a penthouse onto her head, leading to her dismissal, a case of mistaken identity as the banker's mistress, and a cascade of comic misunderstandings.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	16 July 1937, Paramount Pictures, Inc.; black and white, 88 minutes, 9 reels (7,911 feet)¹
Director / producer	Mitchell Leisen; produced by Arthur Hornblow Jr.¹
Writers	Screenplay by Preston Sturges; story by Vera Caspary¹
Principal cast	Jean Arthur (Mary Smith), Edward Arnold (J. B. Ball), Ray Milland (John Ball, Jr.), with Luis Alberni, Mary Nash, Franklin Pangborn, and William Demarest¹
Key crew	Cinematography Ted Tetzlaff; editing Doane Harrison; art direction Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté¹
Signature premise	A $58,000 sable coat thrown from a Fifth Avenue penthouse lands on a clerk riding a double-decker bus¹
Standing	Included in the BFI's list of 10 great screwball comedy films; 100% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (11 reviews)²^•³

Spoilers

Plot

Millionaire banker J. B. Ball, known in the press as "The Bull of Broad Street," discovers that his wife has bought a $58,000 sable coat and throws it out the window of their Fifth Avenue penthouse. It lands on Mary Smith, a clerk riding the upper deck of a bus, ruining her hat. Ball takes her to a millinery shop and tells her the coat is hers to keep.¹

The coat ruins Mary twice over. Arriving late at the publishing office of "The Boys' Constant Companion" wearing sable, which she insists is only Kolinsky fake fur, she is fired for questionable morals, since no office clerk could afford such a garment. The milliner's gossip that Ball is having an affair reaches the hotelier Mr. Louis Louis, whose Hotel Louis Ball has just refused to refinance; Louis invites Mary to stay at his failing hotel so she can praise it to Ball. Mary, unsuspecting, accepts, and after meeting John Ball, Jr. at an automat (restaurant with coin-operated food dispensers; film's centerpiece scene), where he works as a busboy to prove himself to his father, she is installed at the Hotel Louis while rumors of the affair make the hotel instantly fashionable.¹

The film's centerpiece is the automat scene, in which John opens all the food doors so Mary can eat a free meal, touching off a riot. According to Leisen, in Sturges' script the dialogue between the two was spoken in a doorway as Milland entered and Arthur left, and opening the doors to let New York's "bums" rush in for free food was Leisen's own idea. During the food fight, one cast member reportedly put pepper in the fan, causing everyone to sneeze.¹

Writing and production

Sturges' first Paramount assignment. In 1936 Preston Sturges signed a new writing deal at Paramount, and his first assignment was to adapt Vera Caspary's story Easy Living for studio producer Maurice Revnes. Sources describe what Sturges retained differently: the AFI Catalog, citing a Sturges biography, reports that Caspary's story had the girl stealing the mink coat and beginning a life of deception that eventually cost her the man she loved, and that reportedly all Sturges kept of it was the mink coat, from which he built the plot; a Turner Classic Movies account states that he set aside Caspary's "little story of deceit and illusion" and kept just the title. When Revnes told him that 1936 was not the time for comedies and wanted to abandon the project, Sturges took the script directly to Leisen, going over his producer's head; the film was ultimately produced not by Revnes but by Arthur Hornblow, Jr. A modern Sturges biography states that the film marked Sturges' first assignment at Paramount.⁴^•¹

Leisen's approach. Leisen was one of the few directors to come from costume design and art direction, having worked on The Thief of Bagdad (1924), The Sign of the Cross (1932), and other lavish Paramount productions of the 1920s and early 1930s. He judged Sturges' script "all talk" and injected more slapstick than was usual for him, explaining, "I was getting bored with the polite drawing room comedies I had been doing, and I decided to cut loose." In his biographer's opinion, the added slapstick made the film stronger by giving a visual element to an otherwise all-talk script. According to Leisen, Sturges based the Hotel Louis on New York's Waldorf Towers, which had been a financial failure when it was first built during the Depression, and when Ray Milland actually got stuck in the film's giant bathtub during the hotel scene, Leisen kept the cameras rolling and inserted the accident into the picture.⁴^•¹

Censorship and casting troubles. The Production Code constrained the love scene: Leisen had to stage it with Arthur and Milland lying on a long couch in opposite directions, their heads meeting in the middle, with no physical contact outside a kiss. Jean Arthur was under contract to Columbia but unhappy with the films she had been assigned there; when Paramount signed her for the film in March 1937, Columbia chief Harry Cohn filed suit to stop it. Her contract allowed two outside films a year, so the picture proceeded, but the contract dispute continued, with Arthur countersuing on the ground that the studio had not offered her satisfactory roles; the two reconciled months after filming, through the intervention of Frank Capra. Leisen paid special attention to the nervous Arthur in pre-production, directing her wardrobe tests and styling her hair himself.⁴

Production itself was delayed: a Hollywood Reporter item of 30 March 1937 stated that shooting was postponed until 5 April pending Leisen's recovery from minor surgery, and an earlier item of 30 October 1935 reported that illness had forced Adolph Menjou out of the cast. After release, Twentieth Century-Fox charged in a series of letters that the film was based on the Hungarian play Der Komet by Attila Orbok, to which Fox owned the motion picture rights.¹

Reception and standing

The film is regarded as one of the classic screwball comedies of the era. The BFI includes it in its list of 10 great screwball comedy films, calling it "a pristinely plotted delight from the pen of Preston Sturges, in which misunderstanding is piled upon misunderstanding like an ever-more precarious house of cards," and noting matchless supporting turns from Franklin Pangborn and William Demarest, both of whom became staples of Sturges' later films as director.² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 100% Tomatometer from 11 critics and an 82% Popcornmeter from more than 250 audience ratings.³ A scholarly chapter on social class in Sturges' comedies observes that although Leisen directed, Sturges' imprint is felt most strongly in the film's class-based theme and zany comic tone.⁵

The film remains in circulation: it is available on the BFI Player, and repertory cinemas such as Film Forum, the Brattle, and AFI Silver have screened it in 35mm in recent years.⁶^•⁷

The 1949 film of the same name

The title was reused for an unrelated 1949 RKO Radio Pictures drama directed by Jacques Tourneur, starring Victor Mature as a professional football player with a heart condition, with Lucille Ball and Lizabeth Scott. Written by Charles Schnee from Irwin Shaw's unpublished story Education of the Heart, it was released on 8 October 1949 with a running time of 77 minutes and has no connection to the 1937 comedy.⁸

Notes on running time

The AFI Catalog and the BFI's film page list the running time as 88 minutes, while the BFI's What's On listing gives 91 minutes; repertory listings generally follow the 88-minute figure.¹^•⁶^•⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1940s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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