Easy Money is a Depression-era screwball comedy starring Jean Arthur, one of my favorite actresses. She’s is desperately poor and rides a double-decker bus to a job interview when a fur coat suddenly flies out a Manhattan apartment window and lands on her.

So she keeps it and discovers that it wins her a lot of attentive attention, which she enjoys.

She’s still poor, though.

So she stops at what was called an automat, the Thirties’ version of fast food, for a very little something to eat, and she encounters Ray Milland’s automat attendant.

Ray Milland is not a Cheerful Charlie. He was lugubrious as Oliver’s father in “Love Story,” oily and deceitful as Grace Kelly’s would-be killer in “Dial M for Murder,” and inebriated in “The Lost Weekend.”

But in this scene from Easy Money, he shows that he’s a deft comedian.

He’s a generous actor, too. He shows it here with Arthur and does the same with a Ginger Rogers in a film with a preposterous premise, The Major and the Minor. The two are superb in a film that is very funny and, since it’s set as World War II breaks out, deeply touching.

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2023/03/02/the-gift-of-ginger-rogers/

And a little on Jean Arthur.

https://jimgregory52.wordpress.com/2025/04/26/actress-jean-arthur-1900-1991-an-appreciation/