Mitchell Leisen
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Consider the opening of Mitchell Leisen's classic Easy Living, its plot set in motion when fed-up millionaire Edward Arnold tosses his spoiled wife's fur coat out a window and it lands on working girl Jean Arthur, changing her life.
This diverting and generally affable costarring pretext for Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, opening today at area theaters, solicits comparisons in its press material to such Preston Sturges' comedies as "Easy Living" and "Christmas in July."
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a romantic fantasy—try Mitchell Leisen’s Death Takes a Holiday (1934) or William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (1948)—but it’s probably not the wisest of moves to try to sell one to a teenage audience as a horror movie.
Some critics are savaging Nancy Meyers' "It's Complicated" for being wealth porn in an era of economic downturn, but that hardly seems fair -- would you have denied Depression-era audiences such love-among-the-mega-rich spectacles as "Midnight" (1939) or "My Man Godfrey" (1936)?
Clocking in at three hours (the 1934 Death Takes a Holiday, on which this is loosely based, was a trim 78 minutes), Meet Joe Black is a lingering demise indeed, prettified and devoid of much sting.
What's particularly irritating is that "Meet Joe Black" does have an interesting story germ, which has made for two good movies already 1934's "Death Takes a Holiday" and a 1971 made-for-TV remake.
Loosely based on Death Takes a Holiday, an engaging, if stagy, 1934 contraption starring Fredric March (and all of 78 minutes long), Meet Joe Black is sometimes clever and enjoyable, even touching, yet too often the film makes you feel as if you're in Sunday school.
Meet Joe Black was loosely suggested by the 1934 movie, Death Takes a Holiday, which, in turn, was based on a '20s stage play of the same name.
The story of Meet Joe Black, penned by Ron Osborn and Jeff Reno and based on the 1934 classic Death Takes A Holiday, is not epic in any way.
The rest of the movie, a remake of the 1934 classic "Death Takes a Holiday," doesn't have much going for it either.
Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin's sweet nectarine of a jazz standard "Easy Living" figures, in a glancing yet potent way, in Todd Haynes's Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 novel The Price of Salt.