THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR
(directed by Billy Wilder, 1942)
***+ (out of 5)
.
> No- not major fun, it’s a minor film, but still a pleasure to watch.
. A game Ginger Rogers shows her comic chops playing a woman who is just fed up with life in the Big Apple, deciding to throw in the towel and return to her middle American small hometown. But when she arrives in the train station with the savings she has been carefully accruing for the ticket, she finds that the fares have risen and she does not have enough for passage. Noticing that a child’s ticket is much cheaper, she slips into the ladies’ room, and comes out in costume and character as a markedly precocious minor. She manages to buy the ticket, but a train conductor is very skeptical- as are we! Children are not meant to be so… womanly.
. They begin to search the train for her, and in desperation, she slips into the private chambers of one Major Kirby, played by Ray Milland with his usual panache. Swallowing her tenuous ruse and imagining her to be a child traveling alone, he takes her under his wing, inadvertently shielding her from her pursuers.
. Naturally, the Major has a snitty, unpleasant fiancée who is not deserving of his devotion. (In these old films, there is always such a woman!) Naturally, Rodgers falls for him, but can’t do a thing about it as long as she is pretending to be a child. Naturally, the fiancée is suspicious of Rodgers and naturally, Rodgers plots to undermine their not-to-be relationship.
. Much screwball fun, with one, unsettling caveat: at the end, when the Major inevitably jettisons the nasty fiancée and discovers Rodgers true age and identity… he doesn’t bat an eyelash- doesn’t seem in the least surprised- and falls into an immediate romantic relationship with a female he always thought was a child.
– To call his sudden conversion “unsavory” would be an understatement. It was downright creepy!
*
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