MonsterHunter

This is another one of those screwball comedies they made in the thirties where regular folk are thrown into the strange and kooky world of rich folk. I never tire of seeing the filthy rich act like boobs while falling in love with lower class types. This time the results are very satisfying chiefly because of the witty, if mechanical, script from Preston Sturges and the peppy efforts of Jean Arthur. Ray Milland is also along for the ride as her love interest and watching the young Milland makes you cringe when you remember that thirty years later he would end up in such fare as X - The Man With X-Ray Eyes and Frogs. Cringe because of how long it would take him to get around to making cool movies!

A burly, cranky rich dude named J.B. Ball is one of those cranky, old rich dudes that just can’t stand the way everyone else spends his money. The chef uses butter, when Ball thinks he can use lard. He even questions why a new trash can was purchased. So you can imagine the rich temper tantrum he throws when he sees a bill for $58,000 for a fur coat that his old fuddy duddy wife bought. Now, you may think that $58,000 is a whole lot for a coat, especially for 1937, but it’s a sable coat! You would think that J.B. could come to grips with what a bargain the wife brought home.

He doesn’t and goes tearing through the house looking for her. He catches up with her in their bedroom and she says she is not giving the coat up. He opens up the closet to find the coat, but is confronted with a row of fur coats. Eventually he chases her up to the roof where he takes the fur coat and gives it the old heave ho. It lands on Mary Smith (Arthur) who is riding on a passing bus. She gets off the bus to find the coat’s rightful owner.

She runs into J.B. Ball and he blusters her into getting into his car so that he can buy her a new hat since the old one was damaged by the falling coat. She and he bicker about how much interest there would be after a year, if you bought a coat through a layaway program. It’s a funny scene that shows you that Mary is not one to be intimidated or back down, and will probably speak her mind throughout the movie. I flunked out of calculus in junior college and my conditions of probation include not maintaining a checking account, so I have absolutely no idea who was actually right in this financial debate.

You also like J.B. Ball even though by all accounts you shouldn’t. After all, he’s a rich guy that screams and hollers at everyone. But he does it when people are acting like pinheads, like the shop clerk who doesn’t want him touching a hat. Chief among the pinheads is Louie, the chef turned hotel mogul. Louie is one of those screwball characters that has an accent and mangles English so that hillbillies like you and I can yuck it up over how deliriously dumb this guy must be.

Now, Louie owes J.B. lots of money (try three mortgages) because as J.B. observes, he was a better cook than hotel manager. Louie shows up at J.B.’s office and when J.B. asks if he’s there to pay, Louie announces that he sure is, he’s there to pay his respects! That type of scheming gets Louie all of one week to get things paid off. He scurries out and somehow or other he gets wind that J.B. was at one of the local hat stores with a younger woman. Louie immediately reveals that his mind is in the gutter along with the rest of us because he assumes that this woman must be his mistress, instead of merely a chick who got a fur coat dumped on her head causing her hat to break thereby causing J.B. to have to purchase her a new one. Talk about jumping to conclusions!

He sends over a note to Mary asking her to come to his hotel. Mary is behind on her rent and has resorted to breaking open her piggy bank (after blindfolding it!), and she’s been fired from her job for showing up to work with a fancy sable coat (I think we’ve all had jobs like that) so she figures she’ll mosey on up to the hotel and see what it takes to make the seven bucks a week she needs to keep her place.

As is usually the case in these fantasy movies about the super rich and wacky, there is at least one child of the rich guy that just doesn’t appreciate how great it is to be rich. These days those people are referred to as “mentally challenged,” but back in those days, it was to be expected just as it was expected that your wife would waste a bunch of money on some kind of roadkill coat. Ray Milland plays J.B. Ball, Jr. Junior is inexplicably fed up with being filthy rich and having servants and real butter instead of lard. He tells his daddy that he’s leaving and doing things his way!

“Doing things his way” ended up meaning that he would take a job as a waiter at the local automat. I don’t know what in tarnation an automat is, but I guess it was some place to eat where they had all the food in little windows along the wall and you had to put nickels in the slots to get the food out. Kind of like a giant vending machine with the ambiance of a hospital cafeteria.

Guess, who shows up with only a few nickels to her name? It’s Mary! She has been to the hotel and accidentally convinced Louie to give her the best room in the joint because Louie thinks that if J.B.’s little hussy is ensconced in the penthouse suite, then he won’t foreclose on him. Now, this is all a big misunderstanding, and the misunderstandings only get bigger once Mary runs into Junior by the kind of coincidence that only exists in movies about rich people, ditzy blondes and chance encounters with fur coats.

Junior finds out that she doesn’t have enough money to eat so he arranges to give her free food. This apparently is not in his job description because the house dick (did automats have house dicks?) sees him and tries to arrest him. A scuffle ensues and Junior accidently hits a bunch of levers that opens all the windows enabling all sorts of free food. The patrons discover this and one of them actually goes out into the street to encourage everyone to come in and enjoy the all-you-can-steal buffet. This sets the stage for a food fight that puts the one in Animal House to shame. You’ve got people punching each other out, stealing each other’s food, tripping, slipping, flipping and all the while Mary sits calmly and eats her ill-gotten gains until Junior yanks her out and they make their escape.

Eventually, Junior and Mary end up back at the hotel and she gives him the tour of the place and they end up in a hilariously gaudy and huge bathtub. Neither of them can figure out how to make it work (all the handles are in the shape of fish), so with them standing there in their nice clothes, you’re just waiting for someone to hit the wrong tuna and soak them. They of course do get drenched and end up exchanging all sorts of sweet nothings while I hoped in vain that we could somehow work in another food fight before the end of the evening.

While this is all going on, J.B.’s wife has split and Louie has been stoking the gossip reporters. He even gets called a “greasy little hamburger” for his efforts - I suppose that is probably some type of racially insensitive remark, but since like most screwball comedies, you can’t really decipher his racial or ethnic group, I just chalked it up to overzealous reporting. With his son and wife gone, J.B. doesn’t want to be in his big old mansion all by himself (and with the twenty servants) so he decides that Louie can put him up in the hotel!

Louie practically wets himself when he sees this opportunity saunter through the door. Immediately it goes into all the papers’ society columns that a certain so and so is staying at you know where with you know who doing the you know what while so and so’s wife is out in God knows where. As to be expected with society types, the reaction to such a news item is swift and Louie’s becomes the hip place to rent a room. Some more misunderstandings ensue, the main one being that Junior’s offhand comment to Mary that someone should sell steel stock prompts an economic crisis. The remainder of the movie involves J.B. trying to save his bacon on this stock deal, the various Balls figuring out who Mary is hooked up with and with Mary buying lots of pets.

I guess I’m kind of two minds about some of these screwball comedies. On the one hand, I see them and there are undeniably funny. The best ones like Easy Living are able to mix sharp and sometimes surprisingly frank dialogue along with a healthy dose of physical comedy. The performances by Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold as J.B. Ball are pitch perfect and immediately engage the viewer. You can’t really say anything negative about Ray Milland (we’ll save that for Panic in the Year Zero) simply because he is basically the straight man and his role is so bland that he’s almost a non-presence.

The problem though is that after it’s all over, you wonder if it just wasn’t an exercise in fancy writing and vaudeville style stunts. The situations these movies set up and play out are so ridiculous and Rube Goldbergesque that there’s an artificial quality to things. These characters solely exist and do the things they do, because the plot dictates they have to do those things so that the next big misunderstanding or the next major crazy scene can play out as imagined. There are a few quiet moments between Mary and Junior that at least approach real people talking and getting to know one another, but not much else that these characters do really rings true. There’s no denying that the movie is very funny, but Sturges’ later efforts like The Palm Beach Story manage to balance the manic comedy with down to earth humanity a little better.

© 2008 MonsterHunter