"If You Could Only Cook" is a small film apparently credited to Frank Capra at one point but actually not by Capra, made in 1935, and it stars Herbert Marshall, Jean Arthur, Lionel Stander and Leo Carillo. Carillo was the Cisco Kid's sidekick Pancho on the TV series that boomers may remember; and Lionel Stander's unmistakable voice will be remembered from the Robert Wagner TV show "Hart to Hart." This is a film made during the Depression, and it concerns a wealthy auto executive named Jim Buchanan (Herbert Marshall) who is about to be married to the right kind of woman and is dreading it. While sitting on a park bench trying to escape his board of directors and his fiancé, he meets a down to earth young woman (Jean Arthur) who is desperately looking for a job and can't find anything. Plus, she's just lost her room. She finds a job that pays well, but it's for a couple. She talks Jim into applying for it with her -- he's the butler and she's the cook in the home of a gangster (Carillo). Thanks to her sauce, she is hired. Thus begins Buchanan's double life. You can guess the rest.
A very charming movie with a delightful performance by Arthur and a good one by Marshall. It's always hard to believe that Herbert Marshall was ever a leading man given the roles he had later on, but he was a type that went out of style -- very formal, well spoken, a little stuffy, modeled on the British. Films in the '30s were often based on plays, and the plays of that era dealt with class differences.
Capra initiated a lawsuit against Columbia for crediting him with this film in England, where he was very popular, but Harry Cohn purchased "You Can't Take It With You" for him in exchange for dropping the suit. So a little film, never seen by Capra, paid him a big dividend.
