The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

(On Cable TV, August 2022) Well isn’t this interesting—a pro-union romantic comedy set in the 1940s, featuring a rich man going undercover as a store employee to discover what’s going on behind the growing unrest. Jean Arthur stars in The Devil and Miss Jones as a store employee who, improbably enough, gets taken under the millionaire’s wings as he arranges for her to romance a union organizer. (Meanwhile, he’s got his own budding romance going on.)  There’s the usual amount of irony in a film where one main character is undercover and gradually gets seduced to a cause, but don’t fret—it’s all heading for a cute romantic finish, and it does so without betraying its labour sympathies. While The Devil and Miss Jones runs on some predictable subplots, it’s likable enough that little of it matters—the meatiest part of the film remains the unabashed pro-union viewpoint of the script. (Would it have fared as well ten years later in the middle of the anti-Communist witch-hunt?)  There’s also something interesting in that the two leads of the film are ultimately pursuing romance—but with other people. All of that is really to highlight the swift and competent way the script is written, with rather good dialogue and strong structure underlying a crowd-pleasing comedy that nonetheless takes inspiration from the class struggle. Not bad!