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Easy Living and A Foreign Affair, two classic comedies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, have been given long overdue Blu-ray upgrades from Kino Lorber. Although both films starred Jean Arthur, they couldn’t have been more different.

1937’s Easy Living, directed by Mitchell Leisen, is among the screwiest of the screwball comedies while 1948’s A Foreign Affair, directed by Billy Wilder, is among the most acerbic of post-war comedy-dramas.

Easy Living begins with Wall Street tycoon Edward Arnold becoming enraged over his spendthrift wife (Mary Nash) having purchased a $56,000 sable coat which he retrieves from her and throws off the roof of his 5th Avenue townhouse where it lands on Arthur as she is travelling to work atop an open double-decker bus. Arthur gets off the bus and attempts to find the coat’s owner when she is spotted by Arnold on his way to work in his limousine knocking on the door of the townhouse next door. He not only convinces her to keep the coat but takes her shopping for a hat to go with it in a store managed by Franklin Pangborn.

Arthur then loses her job and goes to the automat with her last quarter where she is befriended by worker Ray Milland who she assumes is poor like her, but who the audience knows is Arnold’s son trying to make it on his own. In the meantime, Pangborn has told struggling hotel owner Luis Alberni about Arnold’s assumed new protรฉgรฉ who Alberni puts up in his hotel to attract customers. The whole business gets screwier and screwier until Arthur and Milland cause a run on Wall Street over the price of steel which almost ends in ruination for Arnold.

Commentary is provided by film historian Kat Ellinger.

The script for Easy Living was the first comedy written by prolific screenwriter Preston Sturges. It is given a sophisticated look by Leisen. The film is the third directed by the often neglected Leisen to have seen a Blu-ray release in three weeks, following the release of 1934’s Death Takes a Holiday the week before and 1941’s Hold Back the Dawn the week before that.

Three years after Easy Living, Sturges wrote the screenplay for Leisen’s Remember the Night starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in the classic Christmas comedy-drama, the handling of which caused a rift between writer and director with Leisen vowing to direct his own screenplays from then on. His third film as director was 1941’s The Lady Eve starring Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. That same year Leisen directed Hold Back the Dawn starring Olivia de Havilland and Charles Boyer from a script co-written by Billy Wilder. Wilder was so infuriated by the changes Leisen made to his script that he, too, vowed to direct his own films from then on. Wilder’s third film as a Hollywood director was 1944’s Double Indemnity starring Stanwyck and MacMurray. His fourth was 1945’s The Lost Weekend starring Milland and Jane Wyman.

Arthur, in 1943, received her only Oscar nomination for George Stevens’ classic comedy The More the Merrier opposite Joel McCrea who had starred in Sturges’ two 1942 comedy classics, Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story. Wilder in 1944, directed Stanwyck and himself to Oscar nominations for Double Indemnity. The following year he directed Milland and himself to Oscars for The Lost Weekend.

Leisen, who had in 1942 directed de Havilland to an Oscar nomination for Hold Back the Dawn, directed her to an Oscar for 1946’s To Each His Own in which John Lund made his film debut in the dual role of de Havilland’s World War I lover and her World War II houseguest, the illegitimate son she gave up for adoption who doesn’t know she’s his mother.

Lund would later work for Leisen in 1950’s No Man of Her Own opposite Stanwyck and 1951’s The Mating Season opposite Gene Tierney for which Thelma Ritter would earn an Oscar nomination playing his mother. In the meantime, Lund would work for Wilder, opposite both Arthur and Marlene Dietrich in A Foreign Affair.

A Foreign Affair begins with Arthur as a prim, prudish Republican congresswoman flying over Berlin on her way to the devastated city with a congressional team looking into the fraternization between U.S. servicemen and the German locals. Arthur has heard that Dietrich, playing a cafรฉ singer who was the mistress of a wanted war criminal, is being protected by an American G.I. She enlists the aid of Lund as an officer from her home state of Iowa to find him, not knowing that Lund is Dietrich’s protector.

Conservative critics were outraged at the film’s depiction of both U.S. Congress members and American G.I.s in the film. The complaints were so loud that Paramount stopped promoting the film which had been the studio’s best hope of major Oscar nominations that year. The film did earn two nominations, one for its screenplay, co-written by Wilder, and its cinematography by Charles Lang, the 1932 Oscar winner for A Farewell to Arms.

This was Arthur’s first film since The More the Merrier five years earlier and would be her last until her final film, Shane, five years later. Although she is top-billed, she is at a clear disadvantage playing the dowdy congresswoman to Dietrich’s beautifully coiffed and dressed performer who gets to sing three ballads including “Black Market,” written especially for her by Friedrich Hollaender. Arthur, on the other and, gets to sing the corny “Iowa Corn Song”.

Dietrich, who spent the war years travelling among Allied troops, often at the front lines, was highly lauded and decorated for her efforts. The vehement anti-Nazi was persuaded to take the role by Wilder only because of the songs written by her old friend Hollaender, the composer of “Falling in Love Again,” which catapulted her to international stardom in 1930’s The Blue Angel.

Commentary is provided by Wilder biographer and film historian Joseph McBride.

Also new from Kino Lorber is the 1943 horror classic The Leopard Man produced by Val Lewton and directed by Jacques Tourneur from a novel by Cornell Woolrich (No Man of Her Own, Rear Window).

Lewton had purchased the novel “Black Alibi” intending to use it as the story for Cat People, his first film for RKO, but was overruled by the studio which chose another story to go with the film’s preconceived title.

The Leopard Man is an atmospheric thriller in which its top-billed actress, Margo, disappears about a third of the way into the film in much the same manner as Janet Leigh famously did later in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Dennis O’Keefe and Jean Brooks, much in the same way John Gavin and Vera Miles in the later film, are left to solve the film’s shocking murders. Two commentaries are provided, one by director William Friedkin and one by film historian Constantine Nsar.

This week’s new releases include Pokemon Detective Pikachu and Tolkien.

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