JohnHowardReid It's good to have this almost excellent screwball delight now available on an excellent Columbia/Sony DVD. Although it's not a fraction as famous as My Man Godfrey or Bringing Up Baby, I think it's a much funnier film, even though it does have a couple of minor defects – not in the writing, but in the playing. First off, I think that first-billed Herbert Marshall is miscast. His acting is faultless, but his personality is wrong. For me, Herbert Marshall lacks charm. It's hard to believe that a lovely girl like Jean Arthur would fall in love with him.My second problem player is Leo Carillo. I think everyone would agree that he over-acts. Problem is that he is actually required to do so, in order to keep up with Lionel Stander. And the funny thing is that we don't mind Lionel over-acting. In fact, we enjoy it. He always shouts and over-reacts because that is his shtick. You could say that's Carillo's method of drawing attention to himself too. But I nearly always find Carillo's performances at least slightly offensive. I don't have the same reaction to Stander's, because Stander is sending up gangsters – or at least movie gangsters. On the other hand, Carillo is satirizing Mexicans. All Mexicans! True, he wasn't the only player in the what-a-dumb-lot-Mexicans-are business, but he was certainly the most prominent. I always cringe when his name comes up on the screen. Aside from the not-always-appropriate presence of Marshall and Carillo, If You Could Only Cook is a delightfully engaging movie. Almost one of the best!

Lawson Perhaps they took this movie and improved on it and came up with the classic My Man Godfrey, which was released a year later. Both tell a story of a rich man who pretends to be a butler so as to get close to a woman he's infatuated with. It's the sort of story I love, I have to admit, so I was quite disappointed that this movie wasn't as well-written as Godfrey, and that Herbert Marshall is not nearly as charming as William Powell. It's a bit silly that Jean Arthur's employer (she's a cook), who runs a bootlegging gang, would arrive at Marshall's wedding guns-ablazing to bring him back to her when in the first place he wanted her as his mistress. It's only because I love Jean Arthur that I'm giving this movie a marginal thumbs-up.

movingpicturegal Entertaining, almost screwball-like, comedy about successful car designer, James Buchanan (Herbert Marshall), soon to be married in what seems like a "marriage of convenience" to a society woman he doesn't love. Well, he meets a pretty out-of-work blonde named Joan (Jean Arthur) on a park bench where she is busy reading the want ads. Finding an ad desiring a married couple for "cook and butler", they decide to pretend they are married and apply for the job (James agreeing to go along with the idea 'cause he "likes" her). Well, they get the job, the employers are a bunch of gangsters, and they end up living in the servants quarters above the garage with just one double bed!This is a very enjoyable film, much better than I was expecting. The plot is lots of fun, and features a couple of my favorite actors, Jean Arthur and Herbert Marshall, who are both great in this - they even seemed to have some chemistry together (even though the first kiss between them looked almost like a boy kissing his grandma). The actors who play the gangsters in this are quite funny, especially Lionel Stander as the main man's sidekick, a guy named Flash who seems like just another dumb mug, but is actually the one who immediately catches on, via snooping around, that James and Joan may not really be a married couple. A really good film that deserves to be more well known than it is.

bkoganbing If You Could Only Cook had been made over at MGM, Jean Arthur would have had her pick of leading men like Robert Montgomery, William Powell, Robert Young, or Franchot Tone all of who might have been a bit more believable as the auto tycoon who gets tired of his stuffy board of directors and walks out on them. As it was Columbia Harry Cohn got her Herbert Marshall is far better cast in more mature parts like in The Little Foxes or the head of MI5 in The List of Adrian Messenger. He really hasn't the touch for light fare like If You Could Only Cook.That's what happens to Marshall though, he walks out on his board of directors and a week before his wedding to Frieda Inescourt who's from a family with an old name, but no dough. On the park bench he runs into Jean Arthur who is one of the great mass of unemployed. They get to talking about food and Arthur sees in the want ads one for a married couple to be cook and butler on an estate. On a whim as these things are in screwball comedies, Marshall and her agree to pose as husband and wife.What they don't know is that who's hiring them is gangster Leo Carrillo who's particular about his food. Not unusual because if you remember Goodfellas the wise guys in stir were very particular about their food and were rich enough to buy what they want in the joint. Carrillo's number two, Lionel Stander, thinks these two just don't sound right.The rest of the film is the normal antics of mistaken identities and mistaken motives and finding out who really loves who after all. It's not a bad film, but not particularly a memorable one.But If You Could Only Cook attained a status way beyond its own importance in film history by becoming the object of a fraud perpetrated on the foreign markets by Harry Cohn. Seems as though when the film reached Europe, Cohn advertised it in the foreign markets as being a Frank Capra Production. When Capra found out about it, he went ballistic and ultimately his connection with Columbia was severed.The story is described in great detail in Capra's memoirs and the whole saga is a great example of the power those studios had back when they were at their height.In fact that whole story might make a great movie.