The Devil and Miss Jones (1941) on Netflix
Approved19411h 32mComedyRomance
The world's richest man, John P. Merrick, owns Neeley's Department Store, where employees hang him in effigy over a union drive. He goes undercover there as Thomas Higgins, a shoe clerk.
- Netflix4.2/5
- IMDb7.6/105,373 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes90%
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Plot summary
John P. Merrick has kept out of the public eye, and no newspaper has printed his photograph in twenty years. He is the richest man in the world, and Neeley's Department Store is one of his many assets. The staff there are trying to unionize and have hung him in effigy without knowing what he looks like. Unhappy at what he sees, Merrick decides to identify the agitators himself. Using the name Thomas Higgins, he takes a job as a shoe clerk and befriends Mary Jones, a fellow clerk, and her boyfriend Joe O'Brien, a labor organizer who was recently fired. Nobody at the store, managers included, knows who he really is.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Frank Ross and Norman Krasna teamed with Ross's wife, Jean Arthur, to produce The Devil and Miss Jones themselves, forming a partnership and borrowing $600,000 from a bank to finance it; all three worked without salary in exchange for profits.
- Filming began with no leading man cast. Robert Cummings was borrowed from Universal, and production had to stop for nine days so Cummings could shoot extra scenes at MGM for Free and Easy in late January.
- Norman Krasna said the department-store story came out of his own life: he worked at Macy's while attending law school and knew what working in a department store was like.
