Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn find that three’s a crowd in the delightful screwball romp, making pointed comedy out of the serious issue of the housing shortage in Washington DC during the first months of World War II.

Prim Jean Arthur (who picked up her only Oscar® nomination for her performance) reluctantly agrees to take Coburn as a boarder, and the next thing she knows he has sublet his half of the apartment to handsome McCrea. Their ménage à trois is innocent enough, but inevitably Arthur's marriage plans come in for modification.

Coburn won an Oscar® for his supporting role as the mischievous old matchmaker Mr Dingle, but the real pleasure lies in the sympathetic ensemble playing: the trio trying to stick to Arthur's farcical morning schedule; sunbathing on the roof reading Dick Tracy; or the young lovers necking on the front steps. Shooting through and around doors, windows and paper-thin walls, Stevens achieves a credible sense of what it's like living in someone else's space. Screening direct from Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, this refreshingly intimate film newly restored c/o Sony and Park Circus resonates with current times.

(Copy from Time Out Magazine)

Restored in 4K by Sony Pictures Entertainment at Cineric, Roundabout West and Prasad laboratories, from the nitrate original negative and the nitrate dupe negative preserved at Library of Congress and BFI National Archive.

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