Deja View

REPLAY | Easy Living (1937)

Director: Mitchell Leisen; 88m.

A peep show of pies, chicken dinners and grapefruit, backlit to silhouette behind little glass doors, carefully labeled, compartmentalized and convenient. Drop nickels in the slot and the door pops.

You can afford only a cup of coffee and a sandwich? Get on the busboy's good side and the next thing you know, he slips you a hot plate — a breach in the marble wall, and the social contract. Soon, all the doors burst open, and diners rush the wall.

The hilarious and anarchic automat scene could stand on its own as a short, but sparkles within this Preston Sturges script satirizing Wall Street during the Great Depression. The scene connects two key characters in a coincidence among many improbable coincidences that drive much of the film's humor. It also mirrors the absurdity of the market.

An editor on the brink of eviction is fired after a fur coat falls from the sky on the way to work and she stops to debate with a banker the number of weeks in a year. Then through a misunderstanding that she fails to grasp because her mind isn't as dirty as the milliner's, she is practically given a hotel penthouse. The apartment's swell, but fails to stop the hunger pains, so off to the automat she goes in her $58,000 mink coat with her last couple of nickels.

After she is given something for nothing, again, she tries to cling to naivete and enjoy the meal, but around her the automat slides into sharp elbows, greasy backflips and smashed china.

Watching something so calculated as the automat explode delights. It is a business that hinges on the working stiff's dearth of coin and time.

The diners' greedy rush mimics the frenzy of the stock market scene but at least it springs from a basic need, hunger. We laugh at one diner's savvy pepper scheme, because the only harm is shattered dishes.


— Becky