THEY FORGOT DEPRESSION FOR 2 HOURS

In “Easy Living� (1937), which screens Friday at 6 p.m. at the County Museum of Art as part of the Paramount series, Jean Arthur is riding on the upper deck of a Fifth Avenue bus when she’s suddenly enveloped in a luxe fur coat that has been thrown from the roof of a stately mansion. It changes her life, costing her her job (as an underling at the Boys’ Constant Companion Magazine), mistakenly identifying her as a financier’s mistress, and even causing a panic on Wall Street. (Edward Arnold is the apoplectic financier and Ray Milland is his playboy son.) “Easy Living� is widely regarded as one of the greatest of the ‘30s comedies, and no wonder: It is as sophisticated as it is humane in its wit, and its dialogue has a timeless glitter.

We may be able to see a happy ending clearly enough, but writer Preston Sturges, working from a Vera Caspary story, and director Mitchell Leisen make the getting there hilarious, never more so than in the volatile, malapropic hotel proprietor played with a grand flourish by Luis Alberni. Also on hand are such redoubtables as Franklin Pangborn and William Demarest. Arthur is at her most radiant, and her very best line occurs when she asks Milland, “How did you expect to while away your time when you grew up?� “Easy Living� is one of those definitive Manhattan movies of the ‘30s in which glamorous people in white-on-white fantasy settings made it possible to forget the Depression for a couple of hours.

Paramount’s lively and amusing 1939 version of the venerable John Willard play, “The Cat and the Canary,� which had been a spooky 1927 silent Expressionist classic, was tailored by writers Walter De Leon and Lynn Starling for Bob Hope, and it made him a star. It screens Saturday at the County Museum of Art following the 6 p.m. screening of “Dr. Cyclops� (1940). Virtually playing himself, Hope is a popular young comedian who’s among the heirs of a wealthy eccentric summoned to a Louisiana plantation for a midnight reading of his will on the 10th anniversary of his death. How very much the Hope of nearly half a century ago is the Hope of today, breezy, self-mocking and fast with the one-liners. Of his dead relative he quips, “Uncle Cy, he was so crooked, they had to screw him into the ground.�

Of course, Uncle Cy’s mansion, deep in a bayou, has the obligatory sliding panels, secret passages, hideous clutching hands, eyes that peer out of portraits and a sinister housekeeper (Gale Sondergaard, deliciously tongue-in-cheek). As directed by Elliot Nugent, this “Cat and the Canary� is more theatrical and less cinematic than the Paul Leni silent version, but it’s lots of fun and not at all dated. Best of all, it has, as Hope’s leading lady, Paulette Goddard, who was such a good-natured foil for Hope that she landed a 10-year contract with Paramount as a result of this film. For full program information: (213) 857-6010; for schedule of UCLA’s Paramount offerings this week: (213) 825-2581.

The Jewish Film Festival continues Saturday at 8 p.m. in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with Uri Barabash’s “Beyond the Walls,� a 1984 best foreign film Oscar nominee, and “Stigma� (1982). “Beyond the Walls� has all the familiar ingredients of a strong prison drama: overcrowded cells, brutal guards under an evil chief, warring inmates, torture, drugs, rebellion, gang rape--the whole lot. But there’s a crucial difference: The prison is somewhere in Israel, and it houses Arabs as well as Jews. Barabash and his co-writers have deftly turned it into an allegory on Arab-Israeli relations that makes a plea for reconciliation.

The more subtle and intimate “Stigma,� which Barabash wrote with Eran Price, has much the claustrophobic intensity of “Beyond the Walls.� Daringly, the film makers contrast their hero’s exit from a mental institution at the beginning of the film with troops heading for Lebanon at its end, thus identifying the invasion with madness. (Unfortunately, this crucial point may be lost in translation via subtitles.) In its foreground “Stigma,� a powerful work in a naturalistic style, concerns itself with the former mental patient’s attempt to come to terms with his life in the reserve forces and with his estranged wife. Arnon Zadok, an intense actor with eyes like burning holes, stars in both film--as the leader of the Israeli faction in “Beyond the Walls� and, in “Stigma,� as a man struggling to keep his self-control in the mine fields of both the frontier and of a disintegrating marriage. Ticket information: (213) 825-2581.