Happy Birthday -- Jean Arthur

So, today really is Jean Arthur's birthday -- there's some dispute over exactly what year she was born, but the most widely-accepted date is 1900 -- and since I already talked a bit about her film career in my post on Carole Lombard, I'll just say now that, all things considered, she's probably my favorite classic movie actress of them all, and I think it's a shame she's not better known today -- although she'd probably be more happy than anybody that her name hasn't achieved Bette Davis or Joan Crawford status. However magical and self-assured she seemed on screen, she was apparently extremely shy everywhere else, to the point that she often made other people uncomfortable and became increasingly difficult to work with as she grew older. She was by no means an unpleasant person, but she sometimes let her anxiety get the better of her and often depended on the right director to make sure she channeled her energy into her acting rather than fretting in her dressing room. Frank Capra was probably the director who understood her best, eliciting some of her finest performances while also devising tricks to keep her stage fright at bay, as in her first scene in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town where he had her play with a piece of string while delivering her lines.

When you look at her in that light, you almost wonder why anyone bothered to work with her at all, but throughout her career she consistently worked with the best directors of her day: in addition to Capra, there was John Ford, Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Borzage, Mitchell Leisen, Howard Hawks, Sam Wood, George Stevens and Billy Wilder; she also costarred with nearly all of the major actors of the thirties and early forties (though, surprisingly, almost none of her fellow top actresses): William Powell, Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Charles Boyer, William Holden, Cary Grant, and Ronald Colman. What's more, many of these directors and costars had nothing but nice things to say about her, with Jimmy Stewart picking her above the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Ginger Rogers as the best actress with whom he ever worked. No matter how shy Arthur was in her private life, she is undeniably enchanting on screen, partially because of her unusual voice, which sounds a bit like tinkling glass, a bit like she has a frog in her throat, and her ability to transform even the thinnest character sketches into people with hearts and souls. What I see when I watch Jean Arthur is an actress who is never, ever on a pedestal, who stands eye-to-eye with her male costars and whom they in turn treat as both a romantic interest and an equal, something that can be extremely rare in the classic film world. She had chemistry with nearly all of those male costars I listed, and managed to draw genuinely erotic performances out of some of them. Her scene with Joel McCrea in The More the Merrier is the be-all and end-all on sex scenes without sex. 

For anyone who's never seen a Jean Arthur film, I think The More the Merrier is a good place to start, but my personal favorite role of hers is Babe Bennett in the aforementioned Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Her scene with Gary Cooper on the park bench is one of the best from any movie in the thirties, and one Capra himself tried to recreate with her in You Can't Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.