Film Review: The Major and the Minor (1942)

Film Review: The Major and the Minor (1942) | Ecency

(source: tmdb.org)

These days, rampaging inflation is making many things people were supposed to take for granted unaffordable. Many who are forced to take some extreme measures to cut costs would probably feel sympathy for someone like the protagonist of The Major and the Minor, a 1942 comedy directed by Billy Wilder.

The plot begins in New York City, where a young woman, Susan Kathleen Applegate (played by Ginger Rogers), has supported herself through a number of odd jobs. During the last of them, she has to rebuff the advances of her lecherous customer Albert Osborne (played by Robert Benchley) and decides that she has had enough and should return to her hometown of Stevenson, Iowa. The problem is that the money she has saved for this eventuality is not enough because the price of the railroad ticket has increased. Susan gets the ingenious idea to make herself look like an 11-year-old girl called "Su-Su" and thus buy a children's ticket, which is half the regular price.

After suspicious conductors find her smoking, she takes temporary refuge in the compartment of US Army Major Philip Kirby (played by Ray Milland) who becomes very protective of what he thinks is a hapless little girl. He teaches at a military academy and is about to marry Pamela Hill (played by Rita Johnson), the daughter of Colonel Hill (played by Edward Fielding). When the train is stopped because of a flood, Pamela catches Susan in her fiancé's compartment, so Major Kirby decides to invite her to briefly stay at the academy in order to show everyone that she is an innocent child.

Everyone falls for the charade, except Pamela's teenage sister Lucy (played by Diana Lynn), who knows that "Su-Su" is an adult but nevertheless decides to keep quiet in exchange for Susan helping her with sabotaging Pamela's attempts to keep Kirby at the academy instead of continuing his career in active service. In the meantime, Susan has to deal with a large number of girl-crazed teenage cadets who try to impress her.

The Major and the Minor was the Hollywood directorial debut of Billy Wilder, an Austrian émigré who was by that point known mostly for his screenplays. He co-wrote the script, based on the 1921 short story Sunny Goes Home, together with his collaborator Charles Brackett, deliberately taking a light-hearted and potentially popular comedy as his project in order to convince Paramount Pictures executives to allow him more diverse and riskier projects in the future.

The script proved quite appealing to the film's main star, Ginger Rogers, who had actually pulled the same kind of trick as the protagonist in her earlier life, while travelling with her mother Lela Rogers (who appears playing Susan's mother near the end). Rogers, who was by that time recognised as a proper dramatic actress with her Oscar for Kitty Foyle, again showed her great skill as one of the grandest comediennes of Classic Hollywood. The dancing that brought her fame as Fred Astaire's partner in the previous decade was reduced only to a few references and in-jokes. Rogers, known as a blonde, deliberately appeared with darker hair and very successfully played a woman pretending to be a child, making the whole seemingly preposterous premise work thanks to her charm and undeniable talent. Rogers would later describe the production as an extremely pleasant experience in her memoirs.

The same was true for Ray Milland, who would later work with Wilder on their Oscar-winning film The Lost Weekend. Teenager Diana Lynn, who actually played a teenage character, is also very effective in her role. Wilder, who, by his own admission, learned a lot about directing from his editor Doane Harrison, showed great skill in his directorial debut. The script also showed his knack for "spicing up" comedic plots with his dry observations about human, especially male, sexuality.

The Major and the Minor is at its best when it shows the contrast between what Susan causes among adult and teenage males at the academy; while the adults become ridiculously infantile in order to impress "Su-Su", the cadets try the opposite and attempt to impress her by becoming more adult than the adults themselves. The motive of lechery, best illustrated with Osborne's famous line "Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini", however, has a dimension that could be problematic for some more sensitive viewers in our times, who could see hints of "ageplay" and paedophilia in the relationship that develops between Kirby and Susan. Wilder, however, was successful enough to evade such issues with the notoriously prudish censors of the Hays Office.

The Major and the Minor was also more acceptable because one of the motives of the plot was the dilemma military professionals had to face when choosing between marriage and serving in distant lands and war theatres. This motive was quite relevant for the audience with the USA in the Second World War. The Major and the Minor was under the shadow of that conflict (which would two years later claim the life of one of its cast members, actor Richard Fiske, who played the role of Susan's fiancé) and it was referenced in the dialogue. The film predictably took a patriotic line and celebrated sacrifices, even in a predictably happy (although not too convincing) ending.

Despite some minor flaws, The Major and the Minor was a huge success and secured Wilder's directorial career in Hollywood. In 1955, it was remade as You're Never Too Young, a comedy with the main characters' genders swapped and Jerry Lewis playing the equivalent of Susan and Diana Lynn playing the equivalent of Kirby.

RATING: 7/10 (+++)