Hollywood's Greatest Year 4

Old fashioned department stores sure made interesting, and somewhat ubiquitous, settings for movies back in the thirties and forties. Bachelor Mother from 1939 (Hollywood's Greatest Year?) is only one-- remember the great scene in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, where he skates around a store at night (he was a security guard), or the really fine pro-labor Jean Arthur vehicle The Devil and Miss Jones? Then there's the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street, not to forget the Marx Brothers' The Big Store. Such movies got to play up the consumerist side of American culture, but they seemed much less mercenary than contemporary films, where a store setting is mostly an excuse for endless product placement (which wasn't the case in those earlier classics). It's worth noting that in all of those films, to one degree or another, management was portrayed as corrupt but redeemable, a nice metaphor-- intentional or not-- for reassuring the public that capitalism could bounce back from the Great Depression. But Bachelor Mother, directed by Garson Kanin and starring Ginger Rogers and David Niven isn't really about the store, it's about the kind of confusion at the center of all the great screwball comedies. In this case, it's a baby left with Ginger, and the assumption made by virtually everyone that she's the mother. Needless to say, various hi-jinks ensue and in the end she has a rich daddy for the young'un.

Back when I was in college, I had a professor who was writing a book on Hollywood and interviewed many of the great stars from the golden age (later, in grad school, I got a chance to work with him a bit on editing the transcripts). After being stood up several times by Ginger Rogers, he built up quite a grudge, and would tell his students that if they watched an Astaire and Rogers film, they should keep their eyes only on Fred. That was, obviously, a tough order to follow, but I have to admit that for quite a while I did my best to avoid Ginger Rogers myself. Eventually I was won over, primarily by Bachelor Mother and Stage Door, which I may have seen as a double feature at the old Thalia Theater in New York. She comes across as more worldly than a lot of her contemporaries, by which I mean the characters she played had a kind of brassiness that never tipped over into toughness. She stayed sexy, graceful, and vulnerable even while delivering a withering putdown that would make Eve Arden envious. The class divide so evident in Bachelor Mother was a great platform for that sort of character, and she certainly carries the film-- though the supporting cast is first rate too. See it if you get the chance.