In the first act of Preston Sturges's screenplay for the 1937 screwball comedy Easy Living, the film's female protagonist Mary Smith (Jean Arthur) is riding on the upper level of an open-roofed double-decker bus when a very expensive sable coat falls out of the sky onto her head. As it turns out, the coat has been thrown from the balcony of a Park Avenue residence by J. B. Ball (Edward Arnold), a wealthy Wall Street banker. This incident initiates a series of events that hinge on class differences, their endless comic possibilities, and their ultimate resolution at the end of the film. Though Easy Living was directed by Mitchell Leisen, Sturges's imprint on the film can be felt most strongly, both in the class-based theme and in the zany comic tone. The scene in which the coat falls on Mary's head is not only one of the most memorable moments in any 1930s screwball comedy; it is also emblematic, I would argue, of Sturges's characteristic treatment of social class.

Sturges adapted the screenplay of Easy Living from a “screen story” by Vera Caspary, in which a working-class girl steals a mink coat from a wealthy woman. Sturges takes the detail of the coat from Caspary, but he turns the narrative completely around: instead of the coat being stolen by an angry young woman who feels slighted by her employer, it falls on the head of an innocent young woman who has no idea either of the value of the coat or of the identity of its owner. The falling sable and its aftermath—in which Mary is mistaken for Ball's mistress and given a suite at a luxury hotel before meeting and falling in love with his son—is a variation both on the good-fairy narrative and on the rags-to-riches narrative. Yet at the same time, the film is a devastating satire of class relations during the Depression years. It is, in fact, Mary's level-headed intelligence that ultimately saves Ball from bankruptcy and facilitates both the preservation of his fortune and his reconciliation with his son.