Show-Stoppers: 1937 And The Chance Encounter With Chiffons

What in the end does it matter to human happiness whether [Fred Astaire's] trousers do or do not have cuffs?

—Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans, Blue Skies and Silver Linings¹

In my formulation: "The eternal is in any case far more the ruffles on a dress than some idea."

—Walter Benjamin, "B [Fashion]"²

A "Funny" Thing Happens . . .

For a brief moment, an accidental encounter between a Wall Street tycoon and an unsuspecting working girl takes on the spectral eeriness of a surrealist nightmare. A fur coat, thrown from a Fifth Avenue penthouse roof during a marital spat, assumes the shape of an ominous, bat-like creature. An overhead shot captures the coat as it slowly descends and seems to envelop an oncoming bus. To the extent that it triggers the coincidental meeting on which the plot depends, this moment is central to the script. But its appearance as a slow, almost dream-like, unmotivated overhead shot is incongruous with the fast-paced screwball action that precedes it. Indeed, it is quite jarring, making it appear excessive and therefore virtually extra-diegetic. That feeling, however, lasts only for a moment. Cut to a medium shot of Jean Arthur riding on the double-decker bus as the coat falls on her head, and the plot soon resumes, unfolding through a series of comic adventures that almost causes the stock market to collapse.

Figure 1.

Mary Smith unexpectedly hit by the coat. Courtesy of the author.

What do we make of this strange moment appearing unexpectedly in a screwball comedy? Of the madcap comedies released during the mid-1930s, Mitchell Leisen's Easy Living (US, 1937), a standard studio film written by Preston Sturges, was hardly the most ingenious. It was neither as fresh as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (US, 1934) nor as lively as Gregory La Cava's My Man Godfrey (US, 1936). Although Paramount marketed it as a Sturges comedy, trying to capitalize on the sensation he had created as a screenwriter in Hollywood with scripts like The Power and the Glory (William K. Howard, US, 1933) and Diamond Jim (Edward Sutherland, US, 1935), the film was not a commercial or critical success.³ Still, as James Harvey reminds us, everyone remembers the moment when "the fur coat falls on the heroine's head."⁴ This is ironic because Sturges himself did not even believe the moment could be filmed. In the script, he suggests that once the coat is hurled over the parapet, "the falling will probably not pick up."⁵

But the moment did make it to the screen, and what intrigues me about it is that it appears in excess. While the falling fur coat is a crucial plot device, it exceeds its narrative function. Writing about the "material of the film" that surpasses its motivation, Kristin Thompson has argued that cinematic excess surfaces when the "narrative function may justify the presence of a device, but it doesn't always motivate the specific form that individual element will take."⁶ Likewise, the fur coat moment from Easy Living is visually extra-diegetic. Its surreal appearance exceeds the necessities of its screwball narrative; the plot would work just as well without that shot. If the film were to advance from the shot of the balcony where the coat is hurled to the medium shot when the coat falls on Jean Arthur's head, the missing "falling" shot would not affect our narrative understanding of the scene.

Yet, the falling fur coat was filmed, and as such, it signifies well in excess of its dramatic content.⁷ In that sense, it functions like Roland Barthes' description of the moment when the two courtiers are pouring gold over the young czar's head in Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan Grozny I/Ivan the Terrible (RU, 1944). There is something in the visual detail of the courtiers' make-up, Barthes suggests, that is erratic—something that "exceeds the copy of the referential motif, [such that] it compels an interrogative reading."⁸ The shot...