But I actually do like both You Can't Take It with You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington despite Frank Capra's overbearingly idealistic mindset and the presence of James Stewart as Arthur's romantic interest. Stewart — seemingly most everyone's idea of the perfect all-American Average Man — is my idea of the perfectly phony All-Hollywood Actor. (In the photo, Stewart hugs Arthur while Lionel Barrymore plays the harmonica in the madcap You Can't Take It with You.)
Jean Arthur, however, shines in both Capra films (even though her role in Mr. Smith is subordinate to Stewart's), and in The Whole Town's Talking, in which she initially feels superior to and then falls for her third most unlikely romantic partner: frog-faced Edward G. Robinson.
I say that Robinson — hilarious in two roles, that of a tough criminal and his mild-mannered look-alike — was Arthur's "third most unlikely" leading man because as far as I'm concerned, the Arthur-Stewart (mis)match remains the most absurd, followed by her pairing with a wooden John Wayne in the 1943 comedy A Lady Takes a Chance. Robinson may not have been the greatest-looking guy in the world, but he may well have been the greatest American film actor ever.
Next Tuesday, Jan. 9, TCM will show Jean Arthur's three films with the underappreciated Joel McCrea, who could do quite well in drama and who was a first-rate light comedian.
The three films are the tedious 1930 melodrama The Silver Horde, in which a pre-stardom Arthur — still a brunette — plays second banana to star Evelyn Brent; Adventure in Manhattan, a rarely screened 1936 comedy-thriller directed by Edward Ludwig; and George Stevens' 1943 romantic comedy The More the Merrier (co-written by Arthur's then husband, Frank Ross).
Arthur won her sole Academy Award nomination for her performance in the Stevens film set in overcrowded wartime Washington, where she shares a small apartment with McCrea and best supporting actor Oscar winner Charles Coburn at his most avuncular. (Personally, I find Arthur's performance in Stevens' 1942 comedy-drama The Talk of the Town to be her finest.)
On Jan. 16, TCM will show four Jean Arthur comedies: The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, in which she plays opposite master light comedian William Powell; the little-seen If You Could Only Cook, a moderately entertaining comedy that pairs an excellent Arthur with classy Herbert Marshall; More Than a Secretary (right), a screwball comedy with the usually dead-on-arrival George Brent (the fact that it's directed by the deft Alfred E. Green, however, is a plus); and the 1940 bigamy comedy Too Many Husbands.
A less effective take on the My Favorite Wife theme — spouse is dead; get new spouse; old spouse is not dead after all; why does life have to be so complicated? — Too Many Husbands is another little-seen Arthur vehicle. In the film, she marries both the invariably delightful Melvyn Douglas and the (almost) invariably dull Fred MacMurray.
On Jan. 23, there will be four Arthur dramas: The minor 1930 melo Danger Lights, with a pre-stardom Arthur doing what myriad other starlets of the period could have done equally well (or equally poorly); Public Hero #1, opposite tough guy Chester Morris and Lionel Barrymore; and the super-rare 1935 drama Party Wire, an attack on small-town narrow-mindedness starring stone-faced Victor Jory as, according to the TCM synopsis, "the most eligible bachelor in town" (what kinda town that would be, I don't know).
On Jan. 30, there will be another rarity: Irving Cummings' 1944 romantic comedy-drama The Impatient Years, from a screenplay by the not completely unreliable Virginia Van Upp (best known for producing Gilda), which has Arthur and the now just about totally forgotten Lee Bowman trying to rekindle their feelings for one another.
That same evening, two Arthur Westerns: Arizona, an expensive 1940 production directed by Wesley Ruggles, and co-starring a very young William Holden and a very middle-aged Warren William; and Shane, George Stevens' elegiac mix of romanticism and realism in the Old American West.
Written by A. B. Guthrie Jr., from a novel by Jack Schaefer, Shane stars Alan Ladd as a gunslinger trying to escape his violent past. Needless to say, the past won't leave the poor renegade alone.
The 52-year-old Arthur plays Ladd's romantic interest (he was 12 years younger than she), but their romance, of course, can't be consummated. No, age has nothing to do with it. In fact, most of Arthur's leading men were younger than she was. The problem in Shane is that Arthur is married to dull settler Van Heflin, and is the mother of a precocious kid played with wide-eyed earnestness by Brandon DeWilde.
Compounding matters, meanie Jack Palance — black hat and all — decides to wreak havoc on the town. As a result, young and adult hearts are torn to pieces, while big and small guns explode like cannon artillery fire.
Captured by Loyal Griggs' evocative lenses and played out to the tune of Victor Young's melancholy music, Shane — even if a tad overlong and heavy-handed — is one of the two or three best Westerns ever made. (With Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood attempted a similar romanticized/demythologizing approach to the Old West, but Shane remains the movie Western paradox.)
Unfortunately, after the filming of Shane was completed neither Brandon DeWilde nor anyone else came running after Jean Arthur yelling for her to come back, please, come back. Shane, though a mammoth box-office hit, turned out to be her last film.
In the ensuing decades, she taught drama at Vassar, acted in a few plays, and in the mid-1960s starred briefly in The Jean Arthur Show on television.
The reclusive actress — in life, as in her movies, a staunch progressive and a free-thinking individual — spent the last years of her life in the Carmel area along the Central California coast. Following a stroke that left her severely impaired both physically and mentally, she died at age 90 in 1991.
As quoted in John Oller's biography, after her death film reviewer Charles Champlin wrote the following in the Los Angeles Times:
"To at least one teenager in a small town (though I'm sure we were a multitude), Jean Arthur suggested strongly that the ideal woman could be — ought to be — judged by her spirit as well as her beauty. … The notion of the woman as a friend and confidante, as well as someone you courted and were nuts about, someone whose true beauty was internal rather than external, became a full-blown possibility as we watched Jean Arthur."