If You Could Only Cook (1935) is another Depression-era screwball comedy that uses the Great Depression as a springboard to humor. It also serves as a backdrop to contrast the silliness with the bleak realities of everyday life that presented challenges and provided plots.
Like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1935), a movie of the same year that we discussed recently here, this movie also features star Jean Arthur and brings along favorite gravely-voiced tough guy Lionel Stander in a supporting role. He is one of the few clear-eyed and sensible people in this movie who wears his cynicism like a shield. Everybody puts up defenses in the Great Depression, and some have more survival skills than others.
The movie opens on their wedding rehearsal in the family mansion, their friends and attendants, like Miss Inescort, just going through the motions of what a real, meaningful wedding celebration should be. When Herbert Marshall leaves after the rehearsal to return back to work and a board meeting at his company, we see that he is not exactly happy. Though he looks forward to his wedding, a sadness, a sense of dissatisfaction nags at him. Frieda Inescort neither requires nor wants wooing. Herbert is a romantic, and would like to have the experience of sentimental romance with a partner who could share life as an adventure.
He faces disappointment at work, too. His executive board does not approve of his new, futuristic, and somewhat cartoony designs for a line of autos. He is told, “This company is in no condition to spend money on wild ideas” for his car designs, because the public has no money to spend on the cars.
Herbert’s response is a bit of fiscal cheerleading: “This
country’s on its feet again, and soon it’ll be spending as it never did
before.”
By 1935, the year of this film’s release, the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt did reduce unemployment since he took office in 1933 (and would continue to drift downward as the decade ended) but we were a
long way from spending as we never did before.
When it comes to survival tactics, Mr. Marshall's character survives the gloom by
being naively optimistic.
But fed up with his frustrations at his company, as well as in his personal life, he goes to a park as a brief respite, an afternoon’s escape to brood. It turns into the kind of adventure he would have liked to have with his fiancée, Frieda Inescort. Instead, he is a far luckier man; he discovers Jean Arthur.
She is on the bench he has chosen to sit upon and brood,
reading the want ads in a newspaper, her suitcase by her side. She’s down to her last nickel and has lost
her digs. But her survival skill is
grit, determination, and belief in herself.
By his presence in the park in the middle of the day and perhaps by his
dejected demeanor, she assumes he is also out of a job.
“Jobs are hard to find, aren’t they?” she remarks
sympathetically and offers him the “help wanted-male” section. “It’s tough these days. About 200 people for every position.” Not unlike today.
We are given to understand she is used to office work, but
she comments, perusing the servant positions, that “the only good ones are for
couples,” a cook and butler, fetching $175 per month. “That’s real money.”
Mr. Marshall, amused, responds, echoing the title, “Now if
you could only cook.”
She admits to being a good cook, having kept house for her
widowed father since she was a girl.
Then a light dawns and she suggests they apply for the job together as a
cook and butler.
Here we have a switch in the usual screwball scenario: she is the practical schemer, and he is the “madcap heiress,” persuaded to go along on a ridiculous romp. It’s a fun premise, and since one never takes fairy tales or screwball comedies seriously, we do not wonder why, since he’s rich, he just doesn’t find her a job in his corporation. He clearly takes an interest in her and wants to help her, but with very human self-interest, he sees this as a final escapade before resigning himself to the seemingly inevitable world of a dull marriage and an unfulfilling career.
Their prospective new employer is a gangster and former bootlegger played by Leo Carrillo, who fancies himself a gourmand and is especially pleased with Jean Arthur’s demonstration of merely holding a clove of garlic over a pan of sauce to infuse its flavor (I want to think she was putting him on, but again, one should never look for sense in a screwball comedy).
Lionel Stander is Carrillo’s right-hand man, who vets all
employees and anyone ever trying to get close to his boss. He is shrewd and will soon suspect the new
butler and cook are not what they seem.
Carrillo, for all his dangerous authority, is as grandiose as a
character in an opera, flighty, passionate, and with the kind of zest for life
we sense Herbert Marshall would like to have.
The “couple” is shown to their new digs—a room over the
garage. It has one double bed.
Mr. Marshall will take a daybed couch out on the porch, assuring her with good humor that she does not need to worry about being unable to lock the door. When Jean retires that night to the double bed, he climbs down the trellis and heads back to his apartment to get clothes and to get a few lessons in how to be a butler from his own butler, played by Romaine Callendar. Callendar, from an old English acting family, did a lot of stage work, and this was his first film since a couple of silents in 1918. He frequently played butlers.
Bess Flowers, our favorite uncredited extra, can be spotted
at the wedding rehearsal.
Romaine Callendar teaches Herbert Marshall to greet people
at the door. The wedding is a week away. Herbert has one week of fun left.
Soon, the lark turns complicated, as both begin to experience possessive feelings for one another, if not love. She is annoyed and complaining when she discovers he has been out all night, and dismisses his excuse of returning for his clothes, as if he is a wayward husband caught carousing. When Leo Carrillo, who begins to fancy Jean, puts his amorous moves on her, Herbert gets angry, warning Carrillo off, defending his “wife.”
And bloodhound Lionel Stander, discovering their separate
sleeping arrangements, does not believe they are married. But they fight as if they are married.
The experience has woken Herbert Marshall up—he wants more from life than this playful situation, and decides to return to his company at night, take his experimental designs for cars, and start over. He shows the designs to Jean, and she likes them, taking far more interest in his work than Frieda does. They are lounging on the double bed with the designs, and he kisses her. It’s okay, though, both of them still have their feet on the floor.
But Lionel has followed him, and he thinks Marshall has broken
into the company to steal the designs.
It’s their day off and they plan to meet for lunch, but Jean says first she has an errand. She takes his designs to sell to another company, hoping to give Marshall the confidence he needs in his work. But the company notifies the board of Marshall’s company that Jean has stolen these designs that belong to them. Poor Jean is nabbed by the cops, but Lionel Stander, who follows pretty much everybody, tells the boss that Jean is being interrogated, whereupon Leo Carrillo sends his boys to get her out.
Neither Lionel nor Jean thinks, at this point, that the
designs are really Herbert’s, because he has used a fake name, and they think
he has stolen the designs.
Leo Carrillo criticizes Jean for being so naïve. “How did you happen to fall for it?”
She replies helplessly, “The Depression.”
Stander adds, incredulously, “I’ve heard of a lot of things
blamed on the Depression.” The
Depression, like Bess Flowers, always gets a bit part in 1930s screwball
comedies.
When they discover that Herbert is the famous car
manufacturer, Jean is angry and humiliated, thinking he was just “slumming” at
her expense, and Leo Carrillo helpfully says he has arranged a hit on him.
Jean is aghast and asks him to call it off, because…ready? She loves him.
Herbert, without much enthusiasm, has shown up in a morning suit (or should that be "mourning"?) for his nuptials, and Leo, who has become protective of Jean, sends his boys into the middle of the ceremony to kidnap Herbert. He’s not unwilling to go, but holding the wedding party and guests at gunpoint is pretty funny.
The mob brings Herbert back to Jean, who is still mad at him, but the gangsters trick Jean into revealing her true feelings by pretending to shoot Herbert.
“Darling!” she sobs in his arms.
If it’s an odd way to find romance, well, blame it on the
Depression.
Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.
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From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books. From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.
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