If You Could Only Cook

Director: William Seiter, William A. Seiter William Seiter

Overview

Jim Buchanan (Herbert Marshall) is a wealthy, highly successful automobile company president, who is about to enter into a marriage-of-convenience with a socially-connected young woman (Frieda Inescort). When his board of directors votes down a new, revolutionary line of cars that he wants to adopt, Jim walks out on his company and his social obligations to re-think his future. He meets Joan Hawthorne (Jean Arthur), an unemployed and homeless young woman, in the park; she doesn't recognize him, and mistakes his uncertainty for desperation similar to her own. Joan persuades him to pose as her husband so can apply as the cook and butler in the home of Mike Rossini (Leo Carrillo), who turns out to be a gangster laying low in the wake of Prohibition's end. Rossini loves Joan's cooking and tolerates Jim's butling; but his henchman Flash (Lionel Stander), who is suspicious of everyone, is puzzled by the fact that the couple don't seem to be living as husband and wife, and also by Jim's nocturnal wanderings back to his corporate offices. Still hiding his identity from Joan, he passes himself off as a frustrated engineer (which he is), and impresses her with his ideas and drawings. A case of mistaken identity and mis-directed good intentions briefly lands Joan in jail, while Jim keeps trying to sort out his attraction to her, versus the loveless marriage he's about to enter into. When all seems lost for Joan, Rossini -- who likes her and her cooking -- comes through with his boys, kidnapping Jim out of his own wedding to try to get the couple back together.

Product Details

Release Date:	04/02/2013
UPC:	0043396424647
Original Release:	1936
Rating:	NR
Source:	ALLIED VAUGHN
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Stereo]
Language:	English
Sales rank:	24,372

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Jean Arthur	Joan Hawthorne
Herbert Marshall	Jim Buchanan
Leo Carrillo	Mike Rossini
Lionel Stander	Flash
Alan Edwards	Bob Reynolds
Frieda Inescort	Evelyn Fletcher
Gene Morgan	Al
Ralf Harolde	Swig
Matt McHugh	Pete
Richard Powell	Chesty

Technical Credits

Everett Riskin	Producer
William A. Seiter	Director

Editorial Reviews

William A. Seiter's If You Could Only Cook is a lightweight screwball comedy with a checkered history, through no fault of its own. Made at Columbia in 1935, it would have been considered a "B" picture at almost any other studio, but for its cast -- Herbert Marshall, Jean Arthur, and Leo Carrillo made it a kind of a "nervous A" in the relatively modest surroundings of Columbia, despite its short running time. Marshall is his usual charming self, and Arthur is all pluck and spirit as the down-on-her-luck working girl willing to give a wild idea a try, if he'll only cooperate by pretending to be her husband, so that they can land two jobs on an estate. Seiter's handling of the material is smooth enough, but the material itself is another matter -- the script is decidedly sub-par and uneven; the first section, telling of Jim Buchanan's impending marriage-of-convenience, and his dispute with his board of directors, is fine as far as it goes, and his chance meeting with Joan Hawthorne is logical. But the transition of the story to the estate of Mike Rossini Leo Carrillo is abrupt, and there's not enough learned about the characters in the course of their settling in at the estate -- and then, suddenly, we're in the middle of a kind of gangster comedy, a kind of prototype Guys And Dolls, and a plot that lurches forward at high-speed, with some serious (and distracting) shifts in tone in the script. What one finally ends up with is an A-movie cast in a B-movie script, without enough of a plot, or an interesting enough array of characters -- apart from the two leads -- to provide lingering interest or entertainment. The movie ended up becoming a serious bone of contention between Frank Capra, who had nothing to do with it, and Columbia Pictures when the latter released it in England as "A Frank Capra Production," as his movies tended to earn bigger fees from exhibitors than anyone else's at Columbia. Capra filed a lawsuit which came close to costing studio chief Harry Cohn his job, before it was settled in Capra's favor.