Tonight I watched a very funny film, "Bachelor Mother" (1939) starring Ginger Rogers and David Niven. I found it in the same Library search for director Garson Kanin that turned up "The True Glory", the WW2 documentary I watched and reviewed the other night. What I do, to look for unseen movies, is that I will see a director's name on an old movie playing on TCM, and then I will check the Los Angeles Public Library database for any movies by that director. I do this with actors and actresses too, the famous and the obscure, just to try to mine the Libe's holdings to the fullest extent, which rivals or maybe even surpasses Netflix. The Libe has nearly everything.
"Bachelor Mother" is pure screwball comedy with a mismatched romance driving the plot, and a baby thrown into the middle of the mix as a galvanizing device. The baby in the situation is like a Hot Potato, if you remember that game. No one wants him, but no one wants to drop him either, because.....well, he's a baby.
As the movie starts, it is Christmastime (and I didn't even search this one as a Christmas movie). The camera pans down a New York sidewalk. We see department store displays of the type that signify the New York Christmas Experience we have discussed. At the end of a city block we come to a stone building with a sign saying something like "Such & Such Home For Foundlings". A middle aged woman surreptitiously sets down a baby basket on the top of the steps in front of the door. Ginger Rogers just so happens to be walking past at that moment. Snow is falling, she is alarmed and reprimands the woman for abandoning her baby in freezing temperatures. The woman states that the baby isn't hers, and anyway, the people inside - who run the orphanage - will take good care of it. She rings the buzzer and leaves. Ginger is still on the steps as the door opens.
So begins a classic screwball mixup, in which the well meaning administrators of the orphanage mistakenly associate Ginger Rogers as the baby's mother, simply because she was there at the door when they opened it. Her protestations are in vain, they've heard it all before; denials from mothers who are ashamed for one reason or another. Keep in mind that this was the 1930s, when unwed mothers were ostracized. Here, though, everything is played light and for comic value.
Ginger works at the department store we passed on the sidewalk. She is a clerk in the toy department, but has just been given a pink slip now that Christmas is over. The orphanage administrators vow to help her retain her job, if only she will admit to being the baby's mother. By this point she is worn down, and broke, so she agrees. The orphanage president then personally visits the CEO of the department store and asks that Ginger Rogers be removed from the layoff and given her job back, so that she will have the means to support herself and her newly acquired baby. The CEO is played by David Niven, who was the King of Suave, Sophisticated but Slightly Flustered Comedy. He was doing it before Monty Python were born. He was English but could play American. He was really funny.
Once he enters the picture, a romance threatens to blossom. Of course it begins, as most movie romances do, as an antagonistic relationship, but because you and I know our movie formulas, we are aware of the possibilities ahead. He likes Ginger, his employee, and he is nice to her......
But Holy Smokes, now his Gigantic New York Blowhard Dad, who owns the department store, starts to see his son Niven around town in the company of Rogers......and the baby.
He makes assumptions and is outraged at the illegitimacy of it all. His son and that toy department clerk (Ginger), unmarried and with a child. The outrage! Blackmail is involved, too, though I shant tell you how.
There are a good many other characters threading into the story, as always happens in Golden Era films, but "Bachelor Mother" is all about the chemistry between Rogers and Niven, and his comedic ability. David Niven was very well known in the 1960s. His star seems to have waned a bit in memory since then, but I think it should be restored. He was a comic genius in his own sly way, very posh and stiff upper lip, unflappable but flappable.
"Bachelor Mother" is pure fun with the kind of story that plays all the way through without diversion, in keeping with the high quality screenwriting of the 1930s. There were no extraneous scenes in movies back then. A plot moved from Point A to Point B to Point C, and so forth to the end. And to tell a well-developed story and do it in Screwball style, with all the necessary comic timing......you had to be very, very talented.
This is another example of why I hold Old Hollywood in such high regard. No one ever made better movies than the studios of the Golden Era.
Two Thumbs Up for "Bachelor Mother". I will look for more David Niven movies as the New Year begins, and more from Ginger Rogers as well.
See you in church in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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