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Jean Arthur: Plays
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Synopsis: Any movie that teams Robert Armstrong with Jean Arthur is certainly worth at least one look. Armstrong plays Chester Binney, a small-town rube who hopes to impress local beauty Ethel Simmons (Arthur). Aware that Ethel is ga-ga about "men of the world," Chester invents a shady past forRead More
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In The More the Merrier (1943), directed by George Stevens, Arthur is Connie Mulligan, a government worker in over-crowded wartime Washington, DC, who rents out a room in her apartment. Her tenant, a retiree played by Charles Colburn, rents half of his room to an Air Force Sergeant Joe Carter (Joel McCrae) behind Mulligan’s back. The two young people are soon attracted to each other. In what has to be one of the sexiest scenes from any film, the two walk home together after an evening out. Sitting on the stoop, Mulligan tries to explain her four-year engagement to another man while Carter is busy “copping feels.”
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Much of the book is taken up with the wildly dramatic struggle of producers, directors, and friends to get Arthur to go on stage and stay there through the run of a play. This was mostly a vain effort. Arthur gravitated to the counterculture and agreed in 1967 to do a play called The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake. Riddled with pot-smoking stage hands, props that wouldn’t work (one nearly fell on Arthur’s head), and actors who didn’t show up, the play closed after the first night. Oller’s account of these events is hilarious, particularly his description of a crazed Arthur kneeling before an audience begging them to let her leave the stage. She alienated so many of her coworkers that the author probably couldn’t list them all without doubling the book’s page count.
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A sparkling little comedy set in overcrowded, wartime Washington D.C., Arthur shares her small, one-bedroom apartment with McCrea and Coburn; the latter playing matchmaker. Coburn deservedly won a Best Supporting Oscar as the lovable Mr. Dingle.
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