by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Billy Wilder
CAST: Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Rita Johnson, Robert Benchley
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh
PLOT: A frustrated city woman disguises herself as a 12-year-old girl to get a cheaper train ticket, but her plan backfires when she winds up befriending a very adult Major on the train. Risqué hilarity ensues.
Billy Wilder’s The Major and the Minor, contains big laughs, true love, and comic/cosmic misunderstandings – in other words, it’s a classic farce from the fledgling career of one of Hollywood’s true legends. However, there are certain plot elements that I suspect would make this movie virtually unfilmable today, at least not without tinkering with the structure here and there. I think the plot points in question will be glaringly apparent to any reasonable viewer, so if I acknowledge them with only the occasional eye roll in my review, I hope readers will forgive me. It is not my intention to prepare a compare/contrast treatise on prevailing attitudes towards women during the 1940s versus today. You don’t need me to tell you that the very concept of an adult male bunk-bedding with a strange 12-year-old girl he just met (among other plot devices) raised my eyebrows. It is firmly a product of its more innocent time. But the whole endeavor is so breezy and carefree that I think it would be a shame to give this film a pass without hearing more about it. So, here goes.
Ginger Rogers plays the lead, Susan Applegate. Having only seen Rogers in the occasional dance film with Fred Astaire, I was bowled over by how naturally comic she is. Based on this movie alone, she could have given Lucille Ball or Rosalind Russell a run for their money. Anyway, Susan Applegate is fed up with living in NYC. Tired of being besieged by lechers at every turn, she quits her job – her 25th in a year! – and tries to buy a train ticket back home to Iowa. When she finds herself short on cash, she dresses up as a 12-year-old girl to get a ticket at half price. Her real troubles begin when the train gets underway, as the conductors are not movie-dumb enough to fall for her act.
She winds up hiding in the compartment belonging to Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland in a mildly uncommon comic role). Because he has a bum right eye, he falls for Susan’s story (she calls herself Su-Su to complete the façade) and takes it upon himself to be her impromptu guardian. Through an unfortunate series of events – a blocked train track, the unexpected arrival of Kirby’s beautiful fiancé, Pamela, and some ill-timed misunderstandings – “Su-Su” finds herself being whisked away to a military school with Major Kirby promising to get her on the next available train back to Iowa. Trust me, it all makes sense, I’m leaving a lot of details out, otherwise we’d be here all night.
The rest of the film involves Su-Su’s misadventures on the military school campus, surrounded by three hundred school-age boys who are inexplicably attracted to this girl who somehow has the presence of an adult woman. They like her, but they’re not quite sure why. The same phenomenon begins to afflict the Major himself, which makes him extremely uncomfortable (understandably so), which makes things more complicated for Susan because SHE’S beginning to fall in love with HIM, and meanwhile Kirby’s future sister-in-law sees right through Susan’s disguise and wants Susan to help her break up the impending marriage, and 20 different cadets show up to escort Su-Su to the school dance, and so on and so on and so on.
This was only Wilder’s second film, but already we can see ideas and situations that he would return to in some of his future films. The woman disguising herself as a girl is a funhouse-mirror version of the men disguising themselves as women in Some Like It Hot. We get the reverse situation, a girl becoming a woman, in Sabrina. The idea of how tough it is to live in the big bad city is echoed in The Apartment. And if you really squint, you might even see an early forerunner of Norma Desmond in Major Kirby’s beautiful but devious and controlling fiancé…it’s a stretch, but I think it’s valid.
The performance by Ginger Rogers in this movie was a revelation to me. I had absolutely no idea she could play this kind of character. She plays everything so believably, whether she’s Susan or “Su-Su.” In scenes where she’s near Major Kirby, her longing for him is palpable, but her outward reactions are perfectly subtle: a slight pause before a reply, a constant gaze, only occasionally a little mugging when he’s not looking at her, and always making sure to keep her brassy voice in a higher register to sound more girly. I learn from IMDb that she was anxious to play this role because she was able to draw from her own experiences: as a younger woman, when she toured vaudeville halls with her mother, she would often make herself appear younger to get cheaper train tickets. Who knew?
Ray Milland had a trickier time of it in this movie. He manages to pull it off, but imagine the minefields he had to navigate. He plays a grown man who is the self-appointed guardian of a 12-year-old girl who, by his own admission at one point, looks like a full-grown woman in the right light. There’s a scene where he feels compelled to at least try to explain the facts of life to Su-Su so she’ll understand why all the cadets are attracted to her like a moth to a light bulb. (In one of the less-enlightened moments of the film, he advises her: “Maybe if you made yourself a little less attractive…” HUGE eye-roll.) Now, we as audience members know there’s really no problem with his mild flirtations because, of course, Su-Su is really Susan. But HE doesn’t know that. Wilder has the good sense to pull everything back from the brink before anything unsavory occurs. It’s one of the best high-wire acts I can think of in a comedy.
(I’m itching to relate all the hilarious Wilder-esque bits peppered throughout the movie, like finding the occasional burnt end in a delicious brisket, but I am anxious to avoid spoilers. There’s the tap dance, the Veronica Lake look-alikes, “the Maginot Line”, the cigarette on the train…oh, too many to list. They’re wonderful.)
As with the best farces, a crisis occurs and it seems as if all is lost, but fear not. Wilder is not known as a genius for nothing. If you think this romantic comedy from the early forties is not going to have a happy ending, you need to see more movies. The Major and the Minor is a delight from start to finish. And if the last line doesn’t quite come up to the standards of “Well, nobody’s perfect!”…well, I mean, what does?
[Note: It’s also interesting to know that The Major and the Minor was filmed and released in 1942, it’s set very specifically in May of 1941, before Pearl Harbor. Here and there are in the movie are references to Kirby’s desire to be stationed abroad in case war breaks out. There’s a moment when he confesses that no woman would want to marry a military man stationed overseas, only getting a letter from him once every two weeks. The reply he gets is very direct, clearly indicating where Wilder stood on the matter: “I think you underestimate us, Mr. Kirby. Perhaps all a woman wants is to be a photograph a soldier tacks above his bunk or a stupid lock of hair in the back of his watch.” Sexist? Or patriotic? Discuss.]
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 