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This screwball comedy stars Jean Arthur as unemployed professor's daughter Joan Hawthorne. While sitting on a park bench, Joan makes the acquaintance of wealthy automotive engineer Jim Buchanan (Herbert Marshall). Unaware of his identity, and assuming that he's as desperate as she is, Joan talks Jim into posing as her husband so that they can secure work as the cook and butler in the home of gourmet gangster Mike Rossini (Leo Carrillo). When it becomes obvious that Joan can't even burn water, she and Jim fear for their lives. But Rossini turns out to be a sentimental soul, even going so far as to having Jim kidnapped at his own wedding to rich-bitch Evelyn Fletcher (Frieda Inescourt) so that Jim and Joan can be reunited. Lionel Stander is aces as Rossini's ratchet-voiced henchman. If You Could Only Cook was falsely advertised in England as "A Frank Capra Production," resulting in a bitter legal battle between Capra and his home studio of Columbia Pictures. Hal Erickson

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Rosalind Russell plays aspiring Ohio journalist Ruth Sherwood, who heads for New York to seek her fortune, accompanied by her sister, Eileen (Janet Blair), an aspiring actress. The girls take a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, which becomes a gathering place for several oddball characters, including a football jock (Gordon Jones), his silly wife (Miss Jeff Donnell) and an eternally drunken fortuneteller (June Havoc). Ruth tries to sell her writing, but is advised by a friendly magazine editor (Brian Aherne) that she'll never succeed unless she writes from her own experiences. Meanwhile, Eileen is continually getting in trouble due to her ingenuous attractiveness. Ruth secures an assignment to interview several visiting Portuguese sailors, who follow her to her apartment, are immediately entranced by Eileen, and break up the joint with an impromptu conga line. Everyone ends up in jail, and it looks as though Ruth is going to have to leave New York without achieving success. But when Ruth begins writing about her life with her sister Eileen, she becomes a success -- and wins the love of the magazine editor in the bargain. My Sister Eileen was based on a series of autobiographical articles by real-life writer Ruth McKenney, who with Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodhorov adapted these stories into a Broadway play. The play was later musicalized for the stage as Wonderful Town (again with Rosalind Russell), while the film version was itself adapted into a separate movie musical in 1955. There was also a brief 1960 TV series, starring Elaine Stritch and Shirley Bonne. As an added fillip, the 1942 My Sister Eileen includes a fleeting guest appearance by the Three Stooges! Hal Erickson

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Rosalind Russell plays yet another independent career woman in She Wouldn't Say Yes. This time she's a psychiatrist who sees no need for a man in her life. Her resolve weakens a bit when she meets Lee Bowman, a dashing combat sketch artist suffering from wartime emotional problems. Bowman falls in love with the shrink and determines to establish a beachhead, while Russell is equally determined to hold her ground. She doesn't say yes for the first 80 minutes of the film, but does in the last six. Even Rosalind Russell made jokes concerning the inordinate number of look-alike films she made in this vein. Hal Erickson

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The W. Somerset Maugham play Home and Beauty was successful Americanized as Too Many Husbands (British title: My Two Husbands). Led to believe that her husband Fred MacMurray has drowned in a shipwreck, socialite Jean Arthur marries Melvyn Douglas. In time-honored Enoch Arden fashion, MacMurray turns up alive. The rest of the film finds Jean's two husbands figuratively duking it out for her affections. For a Production Code-era film, Too Many Husbands is remarkably risque, with a delicious open-ended denouement. And besides, we get to see the matchless Jean Arthur do the rhumba! In 1955, Columbia trotted out this property once more, and the result was the musical comedy Three For The Show, starring Jack Lemmon and Marge & Gower Champion. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 043396293892
• Source: SONY PICTURES
• Region Code: 1
• Time: 5:36:00
• Sales Rank: 844

This set contains DVDs which may be available separately:

• If You Could Only Cook
• Too Many Husbands
• My Sister Eileen
• She Wouldn't Say Yes

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