The Devil and Miss Jones

Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn, and Spring Byington

Sam Wood's The Devil and Miss Jones, from 1941, is a barely adequate workplace comedy released by RKO pictures. The film was an independent production helmed by screenwriter Norman Krasna and producer Frank Ross, who was leading lady Jean Arthur's husband at the time. That said, the film is more of a vehicle for Charles Coburn who plays a New York based plutocrat. Coburn's character is chagrined to open his morning paper and find that he has been hung in effigy by the employees of a department store he owns. He decides to work undercover at the store in order to ferret out the labor agitators who have besmirched him. Of course, once he has to undergone the indignities of retail employment, particularly the petty humiliations dished out by shoe department manager Edmund Gwenn, Coburn begins to have a change of heart. He is befriended by Ms. Arthur's clerk and draws the romantic interest of Spring Byington. He even begins to admire Robert Cummings' labor organizer who is Ms. Arthur's steady. The film climaxes with a spasm of collective action that results in better working conditions and a resolution of the romantic pairings.

The film's class based grievances, a staple of Hollywood films in the 1930s, would soon be cast away as the film industry strove to present a united national front for wartime. It is ironic that this somewhat leftist film boasts Sam Wood as director since Wood would go on to be one of Hollywood's principle red baiters before his death in 1949. Regardless of politics, I find Wood's alternately leaden and bizarre direction to be the chief flaw of the film. The comic interplays and reactions always seem a beat behind. He overuses close-ups so much that the heads of his players resemble untethered Macy's Thanksgiving day parade balloons. This would be fine if Wood was satirizing fat cats like George Grosz or Sergei Eisenstein, but a strong directorial point of view is not to be found in a Sam Wood film. William Cameron Menzies sets, which seems to share elements found in RKO's Citizen Kane, are not fully utilized and the rear projection shots are shoddily integrated. 

Arthur and Coburn are two of the more unusual and pleasing stars of this era. Coburn's meteoric rise after returning to Hollywood in 1937 following the death of his first wife is an amazing story. He kept replaying the same curmudgeonly benefactor until his death in 1961. Arthur is my favorite Hollywood actress of this golden era, but is playing second fiddle to Coburn in The Devil and Miss Jones. She has a neat bit pondering what shoe to use in order to bonk Coburn unconscious, but has zero chemistry with Bob Cummings. Coburn and Byington's chemistry, in contrast, is warm.  I'm not a big fan of Cummings, then a fast rising leading man, but will admit his youthful energy channels well into the role of a rabble rouser. William Demarest and S. Z. Sakall are both underutilized. A better vehicle for the talents of Ms. Arthur and Mr. Coburn is George Stevens' The More the Merrier from 1943.