characterize Classic Hollywood as a vertically-integrated industry modeled on Henry

Ford's assembly line, or, as Thomas Schatz puts it, "as a body of work with a uniform

style-a standard way of telling stories, from camera work and cutting to plot structure

and thematics" (8-9). But seeing Hollywood cinema only as "a standard way of telling

stories" does not enable us to look at the disruptive details. Easy Living, for instance, has

been analyzed as a comedy of class imposture, a Cinderella story that subverts social

hierarchies and redefines femininity in relation to the Production Code. Bernard Dick

reads the film as yet another Depression-era fairy tale. Elizabeth Kendall argues that Easy

Living is a grand vision of social chaos following the Depression. Sarah Berry offers a

more comprehensive account of how consumer fashion is used to "make[] fun of class

distinctions and present[] status as a matter of appearances" (42). Therefore, Easy Living

fits quite nicely into the narrative about late thirties screwball comedies.

 Let me pause here for a moment to clarify the difference between these critical

approaches and my own. While these semiotic readings are valuable in themselves, they

fail to account for the more striking, albeit somewhat inexplicable, fur coat moment. My

argument is not that semiotic analysis does not respond to specific cinematic moments in

general. I am only suggesting here that the visual effect of the shot of the fur coat falling

has been critically missed, and its appeal has not been analyzed, likely because its

surrealist look does not quite fit into the film's symbolic discussion. It is not that semiotic

approaches pay no attention to visual details; but not all details can be assimilated into

such readings, and some of them, like the fur coat moment, inevitably go undiscussed.

Ironically, this approach also inadvertently reproduces Hollywood cinema's tendency to

linearize cinematic details for the sake of narrative continuity.