Mary und der Millionär

This is a wonderful story from the days immediately preceding America's entry into WWII, when the values that made America great were on display in the movies. A powerful department store owner, played by Charles Coburn, gets a job as a lowly clerk in his own store, in order to ferret out the workers who are trying to organize a labor union. He gradually gets caught up in the lives of the clerks in the shoe department (co-stars Jean Arthur, Bob Cummings, Spring Byington, Edmund Gwen) who accept him as just a poor, older man, and his view of things begins to shift. There are some excellent scenes in this movie, especially one in which Coburn is arrested while on a day at the beach with his fellow workers, and has to be kept out of jail by Cummings' bravado. Of course, everything works out well in the end, because this movie was made in the days when good was destined to triumph over evil.

I saw this movie for the first time on TCM, during their run-up to the 2005 Oscars. I expected quaint, cute, pleasant. What I got was much more: strong writing and characters, believable performances, a sure hand of the director who knew how to make comedy work on-screen, an interesting story with plot twists. Even after more than six decades, this comedy still works well. Today's comedy directors and writers could learn a lot from this film: how to make the situations and characters work without shoving in the audience's face. Sam Wood gives the audience for this film some credit for intelligence, and lets the strength of the script and actors emerge. For the first time, I realized just what fine actors are Charles Coburn and Jean Arthur.

It's so full of good, common sense, compassion, wit and joy, that I can barely believe it. How depressing that this masterpiece should never be shown on TV (to my knowledge). It is not the first time that Norman Krasna has drawn my attention. This man is a genius. He writes with a total, unflagging self-assurance and perfection. This movie just cannot be improved upon. There are really no faults in it. The humor is funny without being demeaning, there is not the slightest mistake in taste or judgment. What makes it even more astonishing is that it was made during war time, when patriotism tends to cause people to become sentimental. This movie doesn't spare its country one whit. It does not include some "bad apples" among the workers. On the contrary, it implies that those who are usually referred to as bad apples are in fact the good ones! This movie is very much in the spirit of Frank Capra, and his rooting for the little man, but it outdoes Capra at his own game. There is more Capra in this movie than in all Capra movies put together. Krasna doesn't just root for the underdog, he fights his battles and he WINS! (1990 diary entry).

Ever since I saw Jean Arthur in "The More The Merrier", I fell in love with her. What beauty, what talent, what a VOICE!

This is one of her better films. More reminiscent of a Capra film. It's the working class vs the wealthy uncaring class. This goes beyond that though. It tells the tale of a rich man(Coburn) who hears of a revolt at one of his businesses. He wants it stopped and he wants heads to roll!!

When he thinks the investigation is not going to his liking, he decides to go undercover himself. Now this is where the REAL story starts. Now he is on THEIR ground and he sees for himself what these working class "pigs" are really like. They are just people. People with little money and big hearts, who just want a better life.

Everyone is wonderful in this film. Jean Arthur and Charles Coburn work terrific together as always(no wonder they did three movies together). I was surprised to see Robert Cummings in a major role back in 1941. I didn't know he was a star before Television.

The only real disappointment I had with this film was Edmund Gwenn. I could not believe it. The man that IS Santa Claus played a mean rude little man. EGAD!!

Seriously though, This is a MUST SEE for those who love good hearted comedies. Just makes you feel so good. An 8 out of 10.

The Devil And Miss Jones was the first film of which there were to be many in which Frank Ross produced and his wife Jean Arthur starred for RKO. The team did do one other, A Lady Takes A Chance, and Ross did some writing for The More The Merrier, but the Ross/Arthur marriage was breaking up and no more films followed.

That's a pity because The Devil And Miss Jones is a sparkling comedy about a very rich man who goes incognito among his employees to see how they live.

Of course that's not what Charles Coburn's original intent. Coburn has a passion for anonymity the same way Donald Trump loves seeing his name in the papers. When this reclusive millionaire gets picketed at his home by workers from a department store that's one of his minor holdings, Coburn isn't happy. He decides to find out just who the leftwing subversives are and takes a job as a shoe salesman in said department store.

What he does find that is that the place is run by a gang of petty tyrants, using and abusing the authority of his name. He also gets to know the union heads who in this case are a young couple, Jean Arthur and Robert Cummings.

But what really made The Devil And Miss Jones sparkle was the October romance of Coburn and Arthur's friend Spring Byington. They just might qualify as the oldest romantic coupling in film history. But they were a delightful pair. I'll bet when Coburn was young the women threw themselves at him like crazy. But as he got older and cynical it wasn't what he wanted, a trophy wife was not on the list. Some real love was just what Coburn needed.

The Devil And Miss Jones got two Oscar nominations, for Best Original Screenplay for Norman Krasna and for Best Supporting Actor for Charles Coburn. He lost the race to Donald Crisp for How Green Was My Valley which really was a supporting role. Coburn in fact is in the lead, he has more screen time than either Arthur or Cummings.

Jean Arthur was a wise woman, she could have pulled star rank with the producer and gotten more time, but she knew that Coburn was the one who made the film.

This was a timely film then and still topical now. Organized labor was gaining the right to collective bargaining under the Wagner Act in those years and the papers were full of places like this department store finally gaining a union shop. It's something that labor still fights for though on different fronts today.

As a political film, The Devil And Miss Jones is very much relevant today. As a comedy it's still very funny as Charles Coburn learns that real love is something all his money can't buy.