The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer

One of the few bright spots in a year characterized by dark tales of crime and punishment, double-crosses and dangerous dames, is this utterly charming screwball-adjacent romantic comedy produced by the great Dore Schary and written by Sidney Sheldon. The story of an impossibly handsome artist constantly in trouble with the law who is "sentenced" to go out with a teenage girl with a crush on him might seem an odd and far too racy subject for a light comedy in 1947. But the pitch-perfect tone of every single choice made in this delightful romp makes it impossible for even the most uptight prude not to fall for it. And there's a good deal more substance to this picture than one might think, given its absurd premise. Most perfect is the casting, with each role seemingly tailor-made for its actor. Cary Grant plays Richard Nugent, a sophisticated bachelor playboy unaware of how attractive he is and how much his looks advantage him in society. Myrna Loy plays Margaret Turner, a no-nonsense judge whose well-ordered life is causing her to miss out on romance while she's still young. And Shirley Temple plays Susan Turner, Margaret's little sister who's in a big hurry to grow up, and is convinced that she is a grown-up, though she's still an impressionable child.

The supporting cast is also first-rate. Ray Collins (Citizen Kane, The Seventh Cross, Leave Her to Heaven) plays Margaret and Susan's uncle Dr. Beemish, a court psychiatrist who incites the story when he states that the best way for Susan to get over her infatuation with Richard is for the reluctant bachelor to play along with it. The iconic character actor Harry Davenport (Gone with the Wind, Foreign Correspondent, Meet Me in St. Louis) plays Margaret and Susan's great uncle, Judge Thaddeus Turner, who thinks the whole situation is ridiculous. Johnny Sands is quite funny as Susan's confused former teenage boyfriend Jerry. And singer, musician, actor, and former teen idol Rudy Vallée plays the stick-in-the-mud assistant DA Tommy Chamberlain, with whom Margaret is in a passionless relationship. The casting of Vallée extratextually capitalizes on the frustration and awkwardness of what it must have felt like to be a teen idol before teen culture really got going.

Not only are the character types ideally suited to the actors, but the age and status of each of these stars in 1947 made them even more fitting for these roles. At 42, Grant was still the best-looking man in any room, so it's totally credible that even an auditorium of high schoolers would swoon when he comes to give a lecture. But he's old enough to look ridiculous when he accompanies Temple to malt shops and high-school basketball games. Grant, by this point, was a slightly beefier man, but his athletic prowess is still on full display in the hilarious school picnic sequence where he enters all the novelty races. Loy, just one year younger than Grant, had established her star presence as a sensible, dependable, sophisticated, but always fun and never ever stoggy gal-about-town in over 100 films by this point, including the entire Thin Man series and the prior year’s The Best Years of Our Lives. Loy was viewed as the "ideal wife" in cinema surveys of the time, and that's no surprise—I mean, who wouldn't want to be married to Nora Charles (or every other wife she portrayed)? But more importantly, she was unique in that she was always the total equal of every male co-star she appeared with—never upstaging them, like Bette Davis or Joan Crawford tended to, and never in their shadows like Donna Reed, Claudette Colbert and even Lauren Bacall frequently were.

Temple's screen persona as the adorable singing and dancing cherub of countless hits like Curly Top, Heidi, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was still burned into the minds of audiences. As a child star, Temple was Hollywood's number-one box-office draw from 1934 to 1938, yet, to this point, her transition to teenage roles had been only mildly successful (she would only make five more movies after this one). But here, at age eighteen playing seventeen, Temple embodies a teenager trying, in vain, to look and act like an adult. She is extremely cute in this picture, but even when she dresses up to model for Grant, she never remotely crosses the line of appearing as a potential object of sexual attraction for him. Thus, when Grant is forced to "date" her to get out of some legal jeopardy, it plays strictly as the comedic situation it's intended as. Still, the juxtaposition of Temple's familiar baby face with a new and unambiguous sparkle of desire in her wide eyes captures the youthful obsession this picture is built around.

The film is a precursor to the glut of movies about teenagers that would soon flood cinemas in the following decade, yet this is very much a 1940s romcom aimed squarely at adults. Sheldon's screenplay wittily harnesses teen slang and teen attitudes to send up the idealism, ennui, unearned confidence, and fanciful desires of adolescence, while firmly underscoring the relevance and importance of the budding youth culture. This is a movie about learning to act one’s age, but the way it conveys this theme is the opposite of a scold and the film is never condescending or dismissive of any character's feelings. The narrative and humor derive from the overinflated emotions of teendom but, importantly, the teens are not the butt of the jokes. Like the best romcoms of Hollywood's golden age, the movie weaves contemporary ideas and meaningful themes around a ludicrous series of absurd narrative contrivances and zany antics that are all executed by performers whose charm, wit, and rapid-fire delivery stay one step ahead of the irrationalities of the plot machinations.

It's no surprise that, after winning the Oscar for this screenplay, Sidney Sheldon would go on to a multi-decade career in television; creating The Patty Duke Show (1963–66), I Dream of Jeannie (1965–70), and Hart to Hart (1979–84). Director Irving Reis, best known for the two films he made right after this, the romantic drama Enchantment and the adaptation of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, is perhaps the one semi-weak link in the production. One wonders what a more gifted director of comedy like Howard Hawks or Preston Sturges might have done with this material, but this is a more than competently handled picture. Reis stages many of the most comedic set pieces in wide shots where we can see all the players, and he has the confidence in his actors and the script to let these sequences play out in long takes. It is a real joy to watch such gifted performers play such well-written roles in a picture that is far more consequential than it seems at first glance.