Charming and witty, Jean Arthur was one of the great actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. While nowadays she's most famous for her comedic works, Arthur wasn't constricted to only humorous movies, being able to play everything from melodramas to crime pictures. Still, it's easy to see why her comedy talents are her calling card to this day. The actress was able to bring the manic, unstable energy of screwball comedy to all of her movies, imbuing them with an electrifying unpredictability. Like a black hole can bend light, so did Arthur bend the tone of every film she was in, making projects bow to the power of her screen presence and helping them become better, more complicated cinema in the process.
Her filmography is full of greatness. The Criterion Channel is celebrating her enviable resume with a new collection of 16 of her films available to stream. Here are some major highlights from that sterling selection…
HISTORY IS MADE AT NIGHT (1937)
Directed by one of Old Hollywood's most underrated masters, Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night is one weird picture. It feels like someone decided to play a screwball comedy as a romantic melodrama with a psychotic edge, stuffing as many wild contrivances into a single plot as it's humanly possible. The result is as bizarre as it is compelling, a narrative that goes off the deep end from the very start, when attempted rape, murder, and rom-com hijinks coexist in the same tonal universe. By the time you reach a Titanic-esque shipwreck spurned on by jealous rage either the film has lost its marbles or we have. Either way, it's a delight and Jean Arthur as the picture's female lead. Her unhinged laughing fit during what should be a moment of romantic triumph is particularly grand.
ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939)
They might not have enjoyed their time working together, but Howard Hawks and Jean Arthur are a match made in heaven. The director of such classics as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday and To Have and Have Not, had a knack for creating indelible heroines whose sheer determination and wised-up attitude made them into magnetic figures, often singled out in a predominantly male environment. As a pianist who willfully decides to live among a community of ex-pat aviators in Colombia, Jean Arthur is pitch-perfect. Her chemistry with Cary Grant, the movie's male protagonist, is especially admirable, following the Hawksian model of antagonism giving way to desire with seamless ease.
MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939)
Frank Capra proved to be one of Jean Arthur's most celebrated collaborators, directing her in big successes like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and You Can't Take It With You. To be honest, I have a certain antipathy towards most of Capra's syrupy oeuvre, especially when the man tried to marry reactionary politics to his trademark sentimentality. Surprisingly enough, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was always an exception, managing to charm my bitter heart thanks, in great part, to its cast. As the titular Mr. Smith, James Stewart has rarely been better while Claude Rains delivers Machiavellian venom as a manipulative senator. For her troubles, Jean Arthur gets the movie's most slyly complicated role, saddled with a great deal of cynicism that is in stark opposition to the rest of the project's naivete. Her arc is one of surrender to the idealism of Capra and Mr. Smith, but she makes it seem natural, more like a hard-won transformation than a plot mechanism.
THE DEVIL AND MISS JONES (1941)
Jean Arthur's characters might come off as flighty or simple, but there's always an undercurrent of intelligence and emotional complexity to them. It's that eponymous unpredictability of hers. She's not a performer who makes radically different choices in every film, but her creations feel more mysterious than the scripts strictly stipulate. The Devil and Miss Jones, a politically confused pro-worker(?) story by notorious conservative Sam Wood, perfectly exemplifies these qualities of Arthur. In the beginning, the actress may seem like she's delivering a saintly take on a terminally upbeat woman, but as the plot advances, we get more and more insights into Miss Jones' troubled inner-life. There's a monologue she delivers with such aching earnestness that it made me tear up, which isn't an easy feat when we consider that this is a screwball comedy.
THE MORE THE MERRIER (1943)
Reuniting her with The Devil and Miss Jones' Charles Coburn and The Talk of the Town's director George Stevens, The More the Merrier earned Jean Arthur her only Oscar nomination. The picture is a wartime romcom in which an obstinate old man manipulates two attractive youngsters into falling in love during a critical shortage of living space in Washington D.C. Such a description could suggest an unpleasant and deeply problematic affair, but The More the Merrier is utterly charming thanks to Stevens' elegant direction and the charisma of the actors who play their characters with surprising naturalism. It also helps that, as the main couple, Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea have palpable chemistry, vibrating with lust during moments of seduction while never betraying the delicate comedy stylings at the heart of the movie.
What's your favorite Jean Arthur picture? Is it on this Criterion Channel collection?