The Miracle Woman - 1931

The Miracle Woman (1931) stars Barbara Stanwyck as a con artist Evangelist preacher who is unexpectedly ministered to by someone in need.  The title character of the movie reflects its era with an obvious nod to the real-life Aimee Semple McPherson, the most popular media evangelist of her day, who reached celebrity status in the 1920s and 1930s, but the similarity ends there.  Stanwyck’s “Sister Fallon” has a backstory more mundane and a future more ordinary than McPherson’s lionized life path, but Stanwyck’s incredible adventure brings her, more than her followers, an epiphany and a kind of humble salvation.

Directed by Frank Capra, this was Miss Stanwyck’s second of five films with him.  The story is told briskly, with some beautiful camera work, and several of Capra’s tender touches.  It is not a story of a woman losing faith or mocking faith; it is the story of a woman deeply disgusted by the hypocrisy of churchgoers.  Ultimately, the faith lost and restored is her faith in mankind.

The title card warns us, “The Miracle Woman is offered as a rebuke to anyone who, under the cloak of Religion, seeks to sell for gold, God’s choicest gift to Humanity—FAITH.”  This is to keep the censors at bay and to reassure audiences that the studio does not support religious fakes. 

We are also reminded of the verse from Matthew, “Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing.”  That could apply, as it has for millennia, to the world of politics as well as religion.

But the story about Stanwyck’s character is far more interesting than the possible rise and fall of a corrupt preacher—we have seen real-life examples of that to fill a mountain of tabloids—because she is not an arrogant, greedy, sociopath, someone with whom we could not really identify and therefore might cheer her downfall.  She is simply a strong but troubled young woman who needs to right a wrong and find her place in the scheme of things.

The movie starts with the lovely hymn, one of my favorites, “Holy Holy Holy! Lord God Almighty,” and a large church, packed with congregants, as Miss Stanwyck takes the pulpit.  She is not the minister; her ailing elderly father is, but he is unwell, and she is standing in for him today to read his dictated sermon. After which, she delivers one of her own.

The church deacons have recently hired a younger man to fill the post as minister, and after twenty years, Stanwyck’s pop is getting the sack.  At the point in the sermon where her father quotes the 23^rd Psalm (King James version), “The Lord is My Shepherd,” she breaks off because that is where her father left off just before he dropped dead.

The congregation is stunned.  She plows ahead with a much more fiery sermon of her own, blasting them for throwing her father away and for their hypocrisy, accusing them of killing him.  “The laborer is worthy of his hire—but you wouldn’t pay him what you pay your chauffeurs.”  He hadn’t accumulated enough savings in his tenure at the church even for a decent burial.  She goes on to threaten to make public the temperance union members who subscribe to bootleggers, and the (apparently many) adulterers among them.

“This isn’t a house of God; this is a meeting place for hypocrisy!”

The congregation runs away from her; they can’t get out of that church fast enough.

Sam Hardy makes his entrance, a visitor to the church, who consoles her on the loss of her father and her home (they’re probably going to want her to vacate the manse pretty quickly now), and offers her a new career.

“Religion’s like anything else—great if you can sell it, not good if you can give it away.”

Aha.  Turning the tables on the “faithful” by feeding into their hypocrisy and profiting from it.  She wants revenge, but is uncertain.  He assures her, “You’re not a hypocrite if you admit it.”

He builds up her new career as a faith healer, an evangelist who gains a following through radio and through her own theatrical services at a barnlike church.

We are now introduced to David Manners, a handsome and charming actor who played affable, mostly lightweight leading man roles in the early 1930s, later returning to the stage and eventually leaving acting in the 1950s to write.  He is probably most famous for his role in Dracula, released this same year of 1931 and which we covered here.  Manners plays a blind World War I vet who will have a profound impact on Stanwyck.

His introduction to us is one of Capra’s skilled emotional moments.  We see a woman sitting quietly in her apartment before an open window, slowly rocking her child in a cradle next to her.  She looks off, with an expression that is enigmatic; seems to convey weariness and yet serenity, as she listens to Stanwyck preach over the radio.  The woman’s vacant expression is fascinating; we don’t know her story, but she is not conveying feelings of being inspired or comforted by the evangelist.  Capra could have had her easily rapt, but she is in a world of her own, maybe just enjoying a quiet moment after a morning of housework and never-ending chores and obligations.

Manners leans out from a window above across the alley and asks her to turn down the radio, which she does.  Before he pulls his head in, there is a downward shot over his shoulders showing us what the alley looks like and how high up he is.  Another deft Capra shot that, though we don’t know it yet, is a kind of foreshadowing, because Manners will contemplate killing himself by jumping out that window in a moment.

As he pulls his head in and we see his apartment, the Army helmet draped over a lamp and various photos and souvenirs of the war, we understand his past, and discover he is blind. 

His kindly landlady, Beryl Mercer, brings the mail with bad news—his songwriting efforts fail to get him published.  When he eventually returns to the window to consider throwing himself out, he hears Stanwyck’s voice from his neighbor’s radio again.  Her sermon has taken a turn into a pure Depression-era keep-your-hopes-up theme, reminding her followers that John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, was a blind man.

Manners’ expression softens, and he gently laughs, feeling, if not inspired, then at least a little foolish for feeling so sorry for himself.

He wants to know more about the voice on the radio, and his landlady takes him to one of her services, which he attends as one amused by the circus-like setting rather than being immediately drawn in.  He is not looking for religion; he is just curious.

The large choir in their sweaters and singing World War I songs like “Over There,” seem more like a college football cheerleading squad than a church choir, but Stanwyck, or more to the point, Sam Hardy, knows the way to catch profits is to catch the most gullible segment of the population, and to catch them, one needs to appeal not to their intellect, but to what makes them feel good, and to put on a good show.

To this end, the curtains part, revealing lions in a large cage.  Stanwyck makes her entrance from an upper balcony, walking down a long ramp to the stage below, wearing a white gown, dressed as if she is an angel.  She enters the cage (Hardy makes sure the lions have been fed and staff are standing by to shoot the animals if they attack Miss Stanwyck), and begins her call to the faithful, to encourage them to enter the cage with her and be healed.

The hired shill for tonight is drunk and misses his cue, but Manners stands to volunteer.  He is not really seeking a cure; he just wants to find out more about Miss Stanwyck and talk to her.  He also senses she has been left hanging by no one going up to accept her challenge.  His landlady is concerned, “The lions will eat you!”

He responds with easy self-effacing humor, “No, they won’t; I’ve got a Murad.”  I think this might be a reference to the advertising slogan for the aromatic Turkish Murad cigarettes.

We have another topical reference of the day to vaudeville’s worst act, The Cherry Sisters, when Sam Hardy berates one of the other hired shills about her lousy performance, “You ain’t even one of the Cherry Sisters.”

After the show, Stanwyck, in her dressing room, tells Hardy she feels frustrated, like a prisoner, and is growing tired of the act.  He insists she continue, partly because they are so successful, and partly because he is growing obsessed with her and is increasingly possessive.

Giving Manners a ride home in the rain—Capra often sets romantic or sensual moments in the pouring rain in his pictures—he invites her up to his apartment and they get acquainted. He amuses her with his toys, a mechanical music toy and a “dancing doll,” and, rather creepily, his ventriloquist’s dummy dressed like a WW1 soldier.

She learns to laugh again and is perhaps touched that his gentle man, with all his problems, has no malice in his heart, no thirst for revenge as she has had.  

Before she leaves Manners after her first visit to his room, there is sweet moment where she turns to glance back at him, and the camera shifts to David Manners, standing there with something like expectancy, more on our part perhaps than his. He cannot see her looking at him, but he senses she has not left yet.

Stanwyck hesitates, then she goes back to him for a brief, soft kiss. 

Her need for revenge is fading away, and this is noticed by Sam Hardy.  He trails her with a jealous heart.  She rebuffs his advances.

Her faithful chauffeur, played by Frank Holliday, can cover for her only so far, and Hardy becomes menacing.  Their manager, who gets a third of a cut of the offerings and merchandising they take in (Manners had bought a plaster bust of Stanwyck to “see” what she looks like, and she is embarrassed at the tacky merch), is found dead.  Later, Hardy will threaten Stanwyck with the same fate if she does not run away with him to the Riviera.  He plants news stories that she is going to take a break for her health and travel the Holy Land.

She agrees to go, to protect David Manners from Hardy.  She confesses to him that she is a fake, but he comforts her.  She "writes" notes to him in fabric on paper so that he can feel the outline of the letters. It must have been an arduous process and looks like a ransom note.

He and the landlady break into the “tabernacle” and to Stanwyck’s dressing room so he can become familiar with the placement of the items in the room, to pretend to Stanwyck that his sight has been restored, freeing her to leave, but it doesn’t work.

On her farewell performance, the crowd is overflowing and exuberant, and she is about to confess her fakery to them, when Hardy cuts the lights.  It is reminiscent of the scene in Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941, previously covered here) when Gary Cooper is about to “out” the Edward Arnold gang and his microphone is cut in the stadium, and no one can hear him.  This was Barbara Stanwyck’s fifth and final film directed by Frank Capra.

A horrific fire breaks out, and people panic, and Stanwyck, strangely, encourages them to stay and sing, that fire cannot hurt them if they have faith and believe in God.  Perhaps she has begun to believe her own powers.  Sensibly, they leave the building. 

Manners, who wakes up in her dressing room after having been punched in the face by Hardy, heroically makes his way down to the stage and rescues her.  They are both removed from the scene outside on stretchers as the crowd recites The Lord’s Prayer.

We jump to many months later, when in New York City, Sam Hardy is working on another scam with a boxer, and he spots Stanwyck on the street wearing a Salvation Army uniform, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with her new fellow Salvation Army colleagues.  She is happy, having just read a telegram from David Manners stating a possible operation might restore his sight, but concedes it might not, “Who cares?”  He also mentions that the ventriloquist's dummy will be his best man at their wedding.  I think he's kidding.

Hardy remarks, “She gave up a million bucks for that?  The poor sap.”

The truly religious are servants to mankind, not managers of mankind.  Stanwyck has found her redemption.  She had never really demonstrated a lack of faith in God; such a question was too difficult for the studio system of the day, even Pre-Code, to examine unless the character could be brushed off as evil and dispatched by the final reel.  What she needed to overcome was her cynicism over mankind, which I think is a more interesting subject to explore; it leads far more easily to corruption. 

The Miracle Woman can currently be seen on YouTube.

*******************************

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

The Great Dictator (1940)

The Great Dictator (1940) straddles absurdity and warning.  The monologue Chaplin delivers at the end is shockingly timely today, and yet it was meant for a previous generation who fought fascism with humor, and then drama, and then, when that wasn’t enough, with armies.

Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” persona had been officially retired in his previous film, Modern Times (1936), which we covered here.  Yet the hapless misfit, here known only as a Jewish Barber, retains the Tramp’s innocence, athletic clumsiness, and knack for getting in and out of trouble.  But here he also has a doppelganger, in the form of a dictator who sends his goon squads to threaten Jews, as he plans for war on a neighboring country.  Despite the childishly pompous dictator’s fiendish actions, he is himself a buffoon, a joke, and something to be laughed at for his ineptitude. We do not really fear him…but we do have a sense of fear over his cult following, who carry out his every whim.

It was a daring film, not only to mock a figure who was clearly meant to represent Hitler during a time when we were not yet at war, but to draw attention to the fact that the Jews were so named as his scapegoats and his first victims.  Other films of the late 1930s and early 1940s, even those that boldly decried fascism at home and abroad, shied away from explicitly pointing out that Jews were being treated badly.  It was a courageous and utterly decent move by Chaplin, but he wrote in his 1964 My Autobiography (NY: Simon & Schuster, p. 392), Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.  For all its boldness in showing ruffian soldiers painting “JEW” on a shop window, the movie has more than its share of silliness.

Some scenes, such as the dueling barber chairs between the dictator and his adversary dictator played by Jack Oakie, clearly meant to be Mussolini, seem right out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.  Mel Brooks-style Springtime for Hitler-type gags that mock the arrogance of the fascists, and the dictator's frantic speech delivered to his adoring throngs in a kind of pidgin-German reminds one of the fast and furious faux German speech of Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. They were the imitators; Chaplin was the original.

There are two serious characters, though, on either side.  Henry Daniell plays an advisor to Adenoid Hynkel, the dictator.  Daniell is sinister, quiet and utterly serious.  He seems far more dangerous than the dictator, if only because he is more intelligent, more self-disciplined, and sociopathic. Compared to him, the dictator seems like a clown.

The other serious character is played by Maurice Moscovitch as Mr. Jaeckel, an elderly leader in the Jewish ghetto who helps the Jewish Barber and his community in any way he can.  We see his concern and his resolve, but he is actually helpless against the onslaught of oppression.

Billy Gilbert has a comic role as a bumbling staff member of the dictator, and we note the silly names further poke fun at the bad guys.  Gilbert is “Herring,” possibly a shortening of Hermann Göring, and the evil Henry Daniell plays “Garbitsch,” (garbage).

Two people who have the biggest impact on the Jewish Barber are Reginald Gardiner, who plays an officer in World War I who was saved by the barber and later repays the debt by saving him from the dictator; and Paulette Goddard as Hannah, a waif of the ghetto.  

Miss Goddard was married to Chaplin at the time, and serves as his innocent love interest.  Though this movie does not really have the Chaplin trademark pathos of many of his comedies, what there is can be discerned through the scrappy Paulette Goddard, orphaned and supporting herself doing housework and laundry, and facing the bullying soldiers.

The movie begins in the later days of World War I where Chaplin as the Jewish Barber is part of a German (or Tomanian, as the country is called Tomania) artillery.  Though the setting with its trenches and bombed-out landscape of leafless trees is bleak, there is a jolt of silliness in how he maneuvers the Big Bertha howitzer, and how he loses a live hand grenade up his sleeve.  

He comes upon Reginald Gardiner, a downed flyer who is desperately trying to escape in his plane from the advancing enemy, and Chaplin helps him, with more gags about flying upside-down.  Though the plane crashes, they survive and we have the end of the war in blaring headlines, movie fashion.

The Jewish Barber spends many years in the hospital due to his injuries from the crash, and has amnesia.  He does not realize a decade has passed when he leaves the hospital; he thinks it has been only a matter of weeks, and like Rip Van Winkle, he returns to find his village utterly changed.  His barber shop is now part of the ghetto, and “JEW” is written across the shutters.

But he seems oblivious to the change at first, or at least does not realize the significance of what is happening around him.  Soon, he ends up the prey of a troop of soldiers, who put a noose around his neck and try to hang him from a lamp post.  Suddenly, Reginald Gardiner intervenes, remembers his old friend, and saves his life.  Since he is an officer, he gives orders to the soldiers to leave Chaplin and the Jews alone.

Meanwhile, the dictator is still spewing his ridiculous orders, and it seems silly when he and Henry Daniell, wanting to preserve Aryan purity, which means getting rid of dark-haired and dark-eyed people as much as Jews, remark, “We’ll get rid of the Jews first, then concentrate on the brunettes!”

Planning world domination, we then have the memorable scene of the dictator considering a large globe in his office, which is actually a balloon, and he tosses it, dances a dreamlike ballet with it.  But at last, it pops in his arms.

Back to the Jewish Barber, who no less silly, shaves a man to the frenetic strains of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5. 

The dictator wants a loan from a banker named Epstein, whom we do not see, but is denied, and therefore he will send his troops to march on a country named Osterlich (Austria).  First, he meets with his counterpart dictator, Napaloni, played by Jack Oakie, and they try to top each other in self-importance. 

The barber and Paulette Goddard are thrown together in the ghetto by circumstances and through the matchmaking efforts of Mr. Muscovitch, who advises the barber to open a beauty shop for women and insists he practice on Goddard.  At first, absentmindedly attempting to shave her as he would a male customer, the barber instead washes and coifs her hair, making the Cinderella of the ashes beautiful.

But life gets suddenly grim again when Reginald Gardiner refuses to attack Jews and has lost favor in the high command.  Though he heroically joins their resistance, he cannot protect them anymore.  He and the barber are captured and sent to a concentration camp.

When they make their escape in stolen officers’ clothing, we finally get to the point we knew was coming all along—the Prince and the Pauper switching of the identical barber and the dictator. (Chaplin’s famous character with his dark toothbrush mustache so resembled Hitler that people referring to Hitler on the sly sometimes called him The Little Tramp, to avoid saying his surname.)  The barber and Reginald Gardiner are whisked to an enormous outdoor stadium, Nuremberg-like, to make a speech of conquest. 

The jokes end here, as the barber, looking sickened in his seat, awkwardly steps up to the stage (how ironic that the word “liberty” is solidly in stone there) and the radio microphones, and the vast sea of willing cult members in uniform leaning on his every word.

He gives the famous speech that resonates with us today.  That it does resonate would not make Chaplin proud of his work, but would leave him, as it leaves us, dazed, depressed, and heartsick.  And angry.

The movie concludes with a close-up on Paulette Goddard, who listens to the speech on the radio.  It is a hopeful and inspiring ending.  But it is not true.  It would take several years of war to stop the madness, because when a people wait too long, madness can only be stopped by force.

It is important to face bleak facts and fight evil in any way possible, even to give one’s life to do so, but it is also important to realize that the evildoers are not invincible.  They can be taken down with the rule of law.  Laughing at them also helps. They hate that.

Watch the speech here below.  The entire movie can currently be found on YouTube.

*******************************

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.

The Impatient Years (1944)

The Impatient Years (1944) is an example of the kind of movie that is hardly ever made anymore, but was a staple of Hollywood’s heyday: current events.  In this case, the consequences of a hasty wartime romance, a quickie marriage and a baby – but when the couple are reunited when the soldier returns Stateside, they discover they are strangers.

(By the way, have a look at the "A" sticker on the car windshield in the picture above - and have a look at this previous post on gas rationing as depicted in the movies of World War II here.)

It’s a comedy, but it’s also a poignant and even rather sad take on what was a common problem as the divorce rate soared in the post-war years.  Even for those couples choosing to stay together, it was often a tough adjustment.  In a real sense, there was no getting back to “normal.”  There was only a mature and resigned acceptance that adapting to a new life was the only course.  Both husband and wife would have become different people in the meantime, due to their wartime experiences.

Jean Arthur is the lady, and she brings her trademark comic chops and intelligent silliness to the role of a young woman, repeatedly described by her father as a “nice girl,” so that we wouldn’t mistake her marrying a soldier almost the moment she met him as indicative of a “V-girl.”  “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t brought up right…it was wartime and they fell in love.” 

Now, however, waiting with her father at the bus station to welcome home her soldier husband on medical leave, she’s as nervous as a cat and clearly uncomfortable with the idea of being married to somebody she knew only for four days.

Lee Bowman plays her husband, home on temporary medical leave.  He’s just as uncomfortable with Jean as she is with him, more so because he is coming home not only to a wife he barely remembers, but to a father-in-law he’s never met, and must try to make himself at home in a house he’s never been to and is already crowded.

Charles Coburn is Jean’s father, reprising a similar role of curmudgeonly matchmaking as he did in The More the Merrier (1943) of the previous year.  In fact, you’ll notice his “The Torpedo Song” of that movie being reprised as a theme for his character in The Impatient Years every time Coburn enters a scene.  He is the voice of common sense, trying to get his daughter and son-in-law to give each other a chance before they divorce – the movie starts in divorce court and the plot is then revealed in flashback.

There are two more people in the house who are strangers to Lee Bowman, one is his infant son, in whom he is delighted, but nervous as to how to hold him.   He has seen only pictures, and is disappointed to have missed his first words – which include “Mama,” and “Henry.”

Henry, played by Phil Brown, is the other stranger, a boarder in the house.  He is a young man who has been immensely helpful with the baby and who regards Jean and the baby as his surrogate family.  A proper fellow who enjoys the routine around the baby that Jean Arthur has established for the home, Henry, as Charles Coburn remarks to Lee Bowman, “He’s a very fine young man.  You’re going to get very sick of him.”

And we see why, but I feel rather sorry for poor Henry, usurped by the baby’s real father.  Despite his late-hour, petulant confession to Jean Arthur that he is in love with her, he stands no chance.  Yet there he is, in Jean’s room, soothing the baby while she goes to warm up the bottle of milk, with Lee Bowman staggering around, trying to find a place to hang up his uniform.  

When Jean returns and the baby is settled, Bowman asks casually, “You finally got him in bed?” and we know that her uneasy reply of “yes,” just short of a double-take is because at that moment, they are both thinking of Henry.  It is one of a few clever double meanings in this script.

As I remarked in the post on her work in The More the Merrier: “Miss Arthur makes this brittle woman interesting, and lovably obtuse.”  One could say the same for her character here in The Impatient Years, except that here she is slightly more irritable as a means of defense.  Her skittishness, and his own being baffled by the strange surroundings and stranger family, Lee Bowman nonchalantly decides to sleep on the floor, giving the excuse that he is not used to a bed after rugged Army life.  It is a gallant move to put his wife at ease, though we can see that she might also take it as an insult.  He ruefully remarks of the baby in the crib next to her bed, “I think he’d be ashamed of his old man.”  It is both self-deprecating and a shaft of conscience to Jean Arthur.

But they quickly get on each other’s nerves the next day and decide to call their marriage quits.  We are brought back to the courtroom scene where Charles Coburn, in an attempt to force them to get to know each other as a way to avoid divorce, suggests to the judge, played by Edgar Buchanan, that they be required to re-live the four days of their courtship that led to their marriage.  Judge Buchanan remarks, “You boys and girls think it’s very romantic to get married just because it is wartime.  You don’t stop to think for a minute that there’s going to be an after the war time, with a whole long life to be lived together.”  Yes, if they're lucky.

It is an admonishment to the young lovers in the audience, and it is a daffy screwball comedy turn in the great tradition of that era, and so we have our second half of the movie as the now bickering couple find themselves in the scenes of their hasty courtship in San Francisco, revisiting the same restaurants, tourist sights, hotel, and marriage license office, leaving confused desk clerks in their wake.  As Miss Arthur grumbles about a marriage license clerk who does not understand that they need to fill out a marriage license to get a divorce, “For heaven’s sake, if he’s going to be so stupid, let’s go.”

Ironically, it is their very spatting like an old married couple that brings them closer together, along with reliving the scenes of their romance and being away from Pop, the baby, the crowded house, her regimentation with household chores, and Henry. 

Because they need to follow through on the judge’s orders, they kiss, but only to avoid committing perjury.  But aha, there’s a glimmer of falling in love again.

Grant Mitchell plays a befuddled hotel desk clerk very concerned about Jean Arthur’s welfare when he thinks Lee Bowman is not only a wolf, but mentally unstable; and Charley Grapewin is the world’s oldest bellboy.  

He loyally sits outside Jean’s door all night to protect her, and humors Lee Bowman when Lee says “I love you,” meaning this is the message he was trying to tap in their old code on the wall of Jean’s adjoining room.  Charley thinks Lee loves him.

When sailor Frank “The Old Magoo” Jenks cuts in at a hotel dance, we see Lee Bowman getting jealous, to Jean’s delight.  But she saves Bowman from the MPs by vouching he is her husband and takes him firmly by the arm, “C’mon, darling.”

Finally, they trek to the house of the minister who married them.  He is Harry Davenport, and his sweet wife is Jane Darwell.  She remembers the couple, and the old folks are thrilled that a couple married in their livingroom, for once, came back to visit them.  It is not a screwball moment, but a very sober example of what a long and dedicated marriage is, and Mr. Bowman and Miss Arthur feel somewhat shamefaced at their fecklessness.

Afterward, they end up at the place where they had their wedding dinner—a Chinese restaurant where the vocalist is Bob Haymes, actor and singer Dick Haymes’ younger brother.  I’m not sure the point of this interlude of him singing at their table, except to give the up-and-coming fellow a bit of screen time. He has a nice voice.  But the dinner is where they really relive their wedding night—Jean becomes ill on fried shrimp, just as she did the first time.

The hotel clerk and his erstwhile bellboy are on the alert when Bowman must carry her up the stairs and she blithely announces her husband has poisoned her.  Charles Coburn and poor Henry arrive at the 11^th hour with a telegram ordering Bowman to the military hospital for his end-of-furlough checkup. 

It now appears that since their trial courtship is over and Bowman is ordered back to active duty, there’s nothing to keep them together anymore. 

In a sweet ending, however, Jean returns to her father’s house to reunite with her baby and discovers Bowman there, playing with him on the floor.  Miracle of miracles—the little boy takes his first steps to Daddy, and Jean is overcome with emotion.  She wants the toddler to walk to her next, and Bowman asks, “Can I come too?”

We have our happy ending, except for Henry, of course.  He's out of luck.

The movie, while not packing a punch like The More the Merrier, has some good moments, and it is particularly noteworthy that the screenwriter and associate producer for the film was Virginia Van Upp (1902-1970) – a child actress in silent films, later a script writer, producer, film editor, casting director, agent – pretty much a Hollywood jack-of-all-trades, unusual for a woman at that time.  (And is this a swell photo or what?) She had been brought over from Paramount to Columbia for Cover Girl rewrites that same year by studio boss Harry Cohn.  Lee Bowman also appeared in that film.

Speaking of the studio boss, The Impatient Years was Jean Arthur’s last film for Columbia under her much-hated contract with much-hated Harry Cohn.  She was free at last, and the wonderful A Foreign Affair (1948) here, and Shane (1953), discussed here, were ahead of her.

*******************************

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

Buy this or any of my books online here at Bookshop.org.