An early-ish film from George Stevens, although he was already famous enough by the outbreak of WWII to be one of the five big-name directors of "Five Came Back" fame. We know him most recently because of The More The Merrier (one of my faves of last year) which, like this one, features the ever-reliable Charles Coburn, although he is a bit wasted as a stick-in-the-mud in this one (well, he usually starts out that way, but melts pretty quickly, but his melt is put off until just before the closing credits in this one). It's a fairly early one for James Stewart, whom, you notice, gets second-billing to the true star, Ginger Rogers, and was only cast on her insistence, because she was dating him at the time. This might explain their fairly sizzling chemistry, in a movie that, while chaste on the surface, has a veritable maelstrom of hormones churning just below. Rogers' comedic role in this has a lot in common with her role in Billy Wilder's The Major and The Minor, without that one's quease-inducing almost-pederasty, and she reminded me of a proto-Lucille Ball on more than one occasion.
Here's the basic plot: the film begins with Jimmy Stewart's botany professor Peter Morgan arriving in New York from his home town of New Sharon, Indiana, to find and bring home his wastrel cousin Keith, whom he finds, sozzled, at a table in a nightclub, waiting to see the woman he's fallen in love with perform her song number. This, of course, turns out to be Ginger Rogers' Francey, with whom Peter is immediately smitten, and as Keith is hiding from Peter in the hopes that he'll give up trying to bring him home, he and Francey leave the nightclub (because, according to her, the food there is awful) for a night on the town.
By the time Keith is on the train back to New Sharon with Peter, Peter is bringing along his new wife. The trouble is, Daddy (Coburn, natch), who, like his father before him, is chancellor of the august University of New Sharon, is unlikely to be enthused. A further wrinkle is that there is a woman waiting at the station with Pops who thinks (more because of Pater's encouragement than Peter's) that she is the future Mrs. Gordon. This is Frances Mercer's Helen, and you can just tell that she and Francey are to come to blows before the film is out. But in the meantime, Francey goes home with Keith, who, if you remember, was the one who first lusted after her, an arrangement that Peter is not thrilled with. The rest of the film is the two of them sneaking around trying to enjoy some marital nookie without tipping off the parents, as Peter tries to pluck up courage to break it to them. An additional complication is the fact that Peter's mother Martha (Beulah Bondi, another reliable performer whom we'd seen before in Remember The Night) has a heart condition that makes her faint at the least sign of familial discord. One particularly stressful incident is the prom
(apparently this university has a prom) where Keith, Peter and Francey turn up together (and Francey only gets let in when Peter claims her as a student of his), Peter hoping to get to dance with her, but Helen has other ideas. It is here that the Francey-Helen fight breaks out and scuttles Peter's plans to introduce Francey.
(Apparently Rogers' famously insured legs had to be well padded for the fight scene.) To prevent Martha seeing what was going on, Keith (who is a great sport, even buying a wedding cake for the couple and giving each one of them their respective model spouse to sleep with as they are kept apart)
has to quickly cut in and dance her away. After a night where they try to canoodle in a boat house only to find it completely overrun already with student couples, just about everything goes wrong for our couple. Eventually Peter does break it to Pops, but is still too scared to break it to mother, who has retired to her bed. But Helen does, and Martha decides to check Francey (who is staying in an all-female boarding house, whose prissy concierge provides great comic relief) out for herself. Amazingly, they get on like a house on fire, and it emerges that not all is as it seems with Martha. But Pops still forbids it and threatens Peter with the sack if he doesn't straighten out. Things go from bad to worse as Martha walks out on father, while father takes a wealthy donor to witness Peter lecturing just after an already sozzled Keith has informed him that Francey is about to board a train back to New York. Peter's great plan to solve everything involves getting drunk for the first time ever. Will it succeed, or will two generations of Morgans be left spouseless?
Overall, although the pace is a little leisurely, and one's patience is tested by Peter's dithering and by contrived misunderstandings of the sort that I have made clear I detest, the performers are all tip-top (Stewart is not as mannered or saintly as he would later become) and the undercurrent of sexual frustration is positively titillating.
But the title is positively meaningless, a fairly common phenomenon for films of that era it seems.
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