The Talk of the Town

George Stevens began his film career as a cameraman, shooting Laurel and Hardy short comedies in the late 1920s before moving into directing in the 1930s. He built a reputation as one of Hollywood's most meticulous craftsmen, working across genres from adventure and comedy to social drama and epic western over a career spanning three decades. During the Second World War, Stevens headed a military film unit that documented the Normandy landings and the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp; the footage he shot was later used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Colleagues and biographers have consistently identified this wartime experience as a turning point that darkened the tone of his postwar work, moving him away from the lighter comedies of his earlier career. His postwar films included "A Place in the Sun" (1951), "Shane" (1953), and "Giant" (1956), for which he won two Academy Awards for Best Director, and later "The Diary of Anne Frank" (1959) and "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965). His prewar work with Cary Grant, by contrast, belongs to the more purely entertainment-driven period before his wartime service.

Jean Arthur was born Gladys Georgianna Greene in 1900 in Plattsburgh, New York, and worked as a photographer's model before entering silent films in the early 1920s, where she found little success. Her career was remade by talking pictures, which revealed a voice — husky, cracking upward into a squeak at moments of feeling — that became one of the most distinctive instruments in American comedy. She rose to stardom at Columbia Pictures under Frank Capra, starring in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and became closely associated with Howard Hawks and George Stevens as well. Her two films with Cary Grant, Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and The Talk of the Town (1942), fall within this peak period and rank among the era's most admired blends of comedy and feeling. Arthur was famously reluctant about her own stardom, reportedly suffering severe stage fright and camera anxiety throughout her career despite her success, and she walked away from studio contracts more than once, including a public dispute with Columbia's Harry Cohn. She largely retired from film after Shane (1953), attempting a brief return to television and stage work, including a much-discussed 1967 Broadway run in The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake that closed quickly, and a short-lived 1966 CBS sitcom, The Jean Arthur Show. She died in 1991 in Carmel, California. Arthur is remembered today as the definitive voice of Depression-era American comedy, an actress whose visible discomfort with fame paradoxically deepened the authenticity of the everywoman characters she played.