Movie Quote of the Day (‘The More the Merrier,’ With the Fine Art of Wangling a Sublet)

[Middle-aged businessman Benjamin Dingle is trying to convince Connie Milligan to sublet her apartment to him instead of to a woman]

Connie [played by Jean Arthur]: “I've made up my mind to rent to nobody but a woman.”

Benjamin Dingle [played by Charles Coburn]: “So, let me ask you something. Would I ever want to wear your stockings?”

Connie: “No.”

Benjamin: “Well, all right. Would I ever want to borrow your girdle, or your red and yellow dancing slippers?”

Connie: “Of course not.”

Benjamin: “Well, any woman, no matter who, would insist upon borrowing that dress you got on right now. You know why? Because it's so pretty.”

Connie: “I made it myself.”

Benjamin: “And how would you like it if she spilled a cocktail all over it... at a party you couldn't go with her to because she borrowed it to go to it... in?”

Connie: “She might have something that I could wear.”

Benjamin: “Not her.”

Connie: “Why not?”

Benjamin: “Because she's so dumpy looking. Never has anything clean. That's why she's always borrowing your dresses.”

Connie: “How do I know you'd be any better?”

Benjamin: [spinning around and patting the clothes he has on] “Well, look at me. I'm neat, like a pin. Ah, let me stay!”

Connie: “Well, look, I...”

Benjamin: “I tell you what. We'll try it out for a week. End of the week comes, if you're not happy, we'll flip a coin to see who moves out.”— The More the Merrier (1943), screenplay by Robert Russell, Frank Ross, Richard Flournoy, and Lewis R. Foster, directed by George Stevens

Seventy-five years ago this week, the warm and witty wartime comedy The More the Merrier was released in U.S. theaters. The script took its cue from the housing crisis then occurring in Washington, D.C., as this once-sleepy peacetime Southern town was transformed virtually overnight into the epicenter of the national-security complex. (For a valuable nonfiction account of this situation, see journalist David Brinkley’s history-memoir, Washington Goes to War.)

This crisis has shut industrialist Benjamin Dingle out of the capital’s hotels, landing him on the doorstep of Connie Milligan. Much against her inclination to sublet her apartment to another woman, she yields to his pleading—and is annoyed when he turns around and sublets his part of the apartment to another male, the more taciturn, taller, younger, and better looking Joe Carter (Joel McCrea).

The film was created as a vehicle for Jean Arthur, who did indeed come away with her only Oscar nomination in her accomplished career. (You can see my account of a last, sad coda to her retirement years—her abortive role in the theatrical run of the Supreme Court comedy First Monday in October—in this post.) It didn’t hurt that one of the writers was her then-husband, Frank Ross.

But Charles Coburn was the actor who actually emerged with the Academy Award (Best Supporting Actor). You can see why in the above passage: He got the best lines, all establishing quickly and hilariously how Dingell became such a well-heeled industrialist—a combination of wheedling persuasiveness with unstoppable energy. Coburn might have received secondary billing to Arthur and McCrea, but his avuncular character instigated most of the action in the script.

No account of the success of the movie should fail to mention the contribution of director George Stevens, who choreographed the most memorable scene in the film: a five-minute walk by Arthur and McCrea to her doorstep, marked by diversions, put-offs, stumbling, his hand touching her arm and back, her fur wrap nudged up toward her bare shoulder, each step punctuated by a hilarious delay, until the payoff—a kiss that sent the audience that saw it with me in a New York revival house three decades ago cheering lustily. (See this YouTube clip for this example of the marvelous chemistry Stevens realized between his co-stars.)

Over the years, I’ve grown increasingly to appreciate McCrea as an underrated but versatile leading man. But the great reason to see The More the Merrier for me has always been Arthur. While what she called her “foghorn” voice signaled alternating currents of strength and vulnerability, her face and eyes radiated a warmth and tenderness that made her career girls well worth the effort of winning in romantic comedies of the Thirties and Forties (especially in the films of Frank Capra). 

After Arthur’s death in 1991, film critic Charles Champlin wrote this tribute in the Los Angeles Times:

“To at least one teenager in a small town (though I'm sure we were a multitude), Jean Arthur suggested strongly that the ideal woman could be – ought to be – judged by her spirit as well as her beauty. … The notion of the woman as a friend and confidante, as well as someone you courted and were nuts about, someone whose true beauty was internal rather than external, became a full-blown possibility as we watched Jean Arthur.”

Two decades after the release of The More the Merrier, Hollywood remade this classic as Walk, Don’t Run, based on a different, more recent housing shortage: at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Walk, Don’t Run didn’t fare as well as The More the Merrier, even with the ageless and incomparable Cary Grant taking over Coburn’s role as the comical older man among the trio in the overcrowded apartment.

Not only were leads Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton unable to match the box-office appeal of Arthur and McCrea, but I suspect that audiences wanted a different ending for Grant in what proved to be his cinematic swan song: Rather than gracefully yielding to youth, sweeping the “girl” away himself—even though, with a nearly 40-year age gap between him and Eggar, such an outcome would not only seem improbable but even dicey.

This Day in TV History (Jean Arthur Sitcom Fades Out, With Its Star)

Dec. 5, 1966—The 12th first-run episode was the final appearance, on the big or small screen, for one of the brightest but most tormented lights of Hollywood’s Golden Era. The Jean Arthur Show, by most accounts a formulaic sitcom, was unworthy of the talents of Jean Arthur, the raspy-voiced but endearing actress who made the likes of Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Cary Grant, and Joel McCrea appear to best advantage.

You can find many of Arthur’s approximately 80 sound and silent films on TCM, and they are among the best that Hollywood produced in the late Thirties and early Forties: Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Easy Living, Only Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Talk of the Town, and The More the Merrier. Though not a classic beauty, she possessed a vivacity and a froggy voice that made Depression-era audiences warm to this spunky career girl.

Robbie Fulks summed up perfectly how classic-movie aficionados like me have felt about this star: “She could light one cigarette/And smile while the world caught fire.” The country music star titled his tribute after the actress’ name, but he could have, with perfect justice, used the refrain of his song: “God’s Jean Arthur.”

Yet Arthur, a notably shy and private woman who abominated Tinseltown’s publicity machine, reacted with relief when her contract with Columbia Pictures expired in 1944. She made only two films thereafter: Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair and George Stevens’ Shane. After the latter was released in 1953, she became something of a recluse.

Fast forward to the mid-1960s. Lucille Ball, who cited Arthur as an inspiration for her own comic style, tried to cajole her friend into appearing on her first post-Desi Arnaz series, The Lucy Show. Astonishingly, though, Arthur’s agent somehow talked her into doing an entire series focused on her, not just a guest appearance on someone else’s. After a surprisingly successful “tryout” on Gunsmoke meant to gauge how well she adjusted to the grind of television, the green light was given for her own show.

The premise must have sounded perfectly fine to Arthur: a widowed lawyer who continually astonishes her partner, her straitlaced son, with her unconventional ways. The profession of that career would have appealed to an actress who specialized more in career women than housewives. And the notoriously press-averse star not only agreed to interviews with the media, but even promoted the show’s advertisers in commercials. (The sole episode I've come across is this YouTube clip.)

None of it did any good. The show could never get out of the bottom third of all TV shows. Nor did it ever enjoy a healthy afterlife in syndication: it didn’t even last half a season.

The cancellation of her show did nothing to encourage Arthur to return to her home. In fact, she decided to take an even bigger risk: a return to Broadway for the first time since she had appeared in Peter Pan in 1950, a show in which she not only had the starring role but had invested $50,000 of her own money: The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake.

How bad was it? William Goldman, in The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, called the comedy “the one legendary production” of that year—if you associate “legendary” with “a certain kind of Broadway show that by virtue of its birth agonies and the resulting publicity achieves an immortality most productions never dare aspire to.” Critic Peter Filichia, imagining a “Broadway Time Machine,” wished he could have seen Arthur’s final preview performance for this show: “A friend who was there told me that Arthur broke character and the fourth wall to tell the audience that she was leaving show business and giving away all her worldly possessions."

As I discussed in a prior post, Arthur had yet another unusual post-TV gid. A decade after the end of her sitcom, the actress—by now a septuagenarian—was prevailed upon to take the role of the first (fictional) female Supreme Court justice in the Cleveland opening of the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee play, First Monday in October. 

It was not a happy experience, as the stage fright that had afflicted Arthur three decades before in out-of-town tryouts for Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday returned with a vengeance. She never acted again. The actress who had played fearless, wisecracking women fell victim to the most disabling fear that a stage performer can experience. No matter: Jean Arthur may have died in 1991, but she is still "God's Jean Arthur" to those who catch her film work.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘First Monday in October,’ on Group Shots of the Supreme Court)

[The Justices of the Supreme Court are posing for a group photograph.]

Ruth Loomis [played by Jill Clayburgh]: “Should we smile a little?”

Justice Dan Snow [played by Walter Matthau]: “Good God, no. Who'd trust a happy Justice?”— First Monday in October (1981), screenplay by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, based on their play, directed by Ronald Neame

Starting in 1917, federal law mandated that the U.S. Supreme Court term would start each year on the first Monday in October. That time of year has rolled around again, so I thought it might be interesting to review how an unusual turn of events took place related to that tradition.

As I discussed in a recent post, Sandra Day O’Connor was confirmed 35 years ago last month as the first female Justice of the Supreme Court. Her nomination threw into turmoil the best-laid plans of Paramount Pictures to release in 1982 a movie that paralleled her situation: a female conservative breaking the all-male monopoly on America’s highest court of appeals.

Instead, to capitalize on the appointment, Paramount ended up moving up the release to late August 1981, before O’Connor began the term on the first Monday in October. The reshuffling didn’t really work: late summer, then as now, is a graveyard for movie releases, particularly those that aspire to reach an audience at least somewhat more serious audience than turns out for summer blockbusters. First Monday in October not only didn’t attract audiences, but even director Ronald Neame regarded it as a case of bad star chemistry between stars Walter Matthau and Jill Clayburgh.

As it happened, that wasn’t the only case of bad star chemistry as it related to this property. The same disease nearly killed the original play at birth.

In writing this post, I found in a local library The Selected Plays of Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, an anthology by the playwrights responsible for Inherit the Wind and Auntie Mame that also includes First Monday in October. Idly looking through the production notes of the play, I discovered that, before it opened on Broadway in October 1978 or even at the Kennedy Center in Washington nearly a year before, the play had premiered at the Cleveland Play House in October 1975, with none other than Jean Arthur playing trailblazing justice Ruth Loomis.

“What were they thinking in casting her?” I wondered.

Let me explain. Arthur, along Irene Dunne, Claudette Colbert and Katharine Hepburn, formed a quartet of actresses who took the romantic comedy to its zenith in films of the Thirties and Forties. She especially worked well under director Frank Capra, in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, where her pert blond locks and what has been called her “carbonated” voice made her the embodiment of the wised-up career woman who falls for the dewy-eyed male idealist. She received an Oscar nomination for The More the Merrier, and probably deserved even more recognition from Hollywood. Many people—myself very much included—regard her as among the shining talents of her time, and can sit back happily when one of her films comes on, confident that a great performance is coming.

Uncomfortable with Hollywood’s publicity machine, which called for interviews and red-carpet appearances, the reticent Arthur was even worse onstage. In his autobiography, The Name Above the Title, Capra discussed how her stage fright was so acute in the mid-1940s that it forced her to leave the Garson Kanin comedy Born Yesterday in its out-of-town tryout, allowing Judy Holliday to assume the role that made her famous.

Arthur appeared in her last film, Shane, in 1953, and a short-lived TV comedy, The Jean Arthur Show, in 1966. So far as I knew, she never had taken on another role until her death in 1991.

So, with these rare stage appearances—and even those enough to give pause—what was Arthur doing (and in her mid-seventies, at that) in a role written with her in mind? The answer is that Lawrence had gotten to know and like her, and however much due diligence he had performed (including with Capra and Kanin), it wasn’t enough to disabuse him of this impression. Only close work with her could do that.

It did. To her credit, Arthur came to rehearsals with her lines memorized. But that only angered her all the more when aging and ailing co-star Melvyn Douglas (with whom she had worked in the 1940 romantic comedy Too Many Husbands) needed more time to master his lines and character.

Nevertheless, the pairing of these two old pros from Hollywood’s golden era was enough to produce sell-out audiences for the play’s opening. If only that could have eased Arthur’s mind!

But reviews were not particularly kind about her performance, and her longtime anxiety about performing in public manifested itself again. Altogether, it was probably a blessing to cast and crew that the show’s producers announced that Arthur would leave the production before the end of the run due to a “viral infection.”

Despite the debacle related to Arthur, producer Roger L. Stevens thought the play still worthwhile to mount at the Kennedy Center. Arthur’s departure actually freed Lawrence and Lee to rethink the role of Justice Loomis. Casting a considerably younger actress in the role would deepen the conflict with the curmudgeonly liberal Justice Dan Stone (modeled in part on the long-serving justice William O. Douglas). Jane Alexander—more than three decades Arthur’s junior—brought a dimension to the role that Arthur simply couldn’t, and her pairing with Henry Fonda, though in a brief run, brought the two actors considerable acclaim. 

The play continues to be performed in regional theaters, where it gives its lead actors plum roles--and audiences the hope that the growing respect between the play's two ideologically opposed fictional justices could actually occur in our terribly divided political environment.