Bachelor Mother (1939)

Bachelor Mother (1939) just only happens to be a Christmas movie on the side, and with screwball Depression-era panache, it swaps humor, farcical truths, and stretched credulity for sentiment.  It parodies sentiment, and with wry Little Orphan Annie-style toughness, dares ya to disbelieve.

This post is part of the countdown to Christmas coinciding with the launch of my newest book, Christmas in Classic Films.

Ginger Rogers is in one of our apparently most-hallowed Christmas scenes: the department store.  She works the counter in the toy department (more competently than Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame), but she is a member of that misfit army, the temp worker.  She has been hired only for three weeks during the Christmas season.  The movie opens in the last few minutes before the workday starts, as the employees line up to listen to their employer give them a perfunctory if well-meaning Christmas sale pep talk and wish them happy holidays.  A few minutes later, as their sales books are distributed (no cash register-printed receipts here), many of them, Ginger included, find a pink slip thanking them and tell them to get lost at the end of the business day.

On her lunch hour, Ginger visits an employment agency, and passing by a foundling home, watches an elderly woman leave a baby on the steps.  The woman dashes off, (claiming, we may assume truthfully, that it is not her baby) and when the door opens, Ginger is presumed to be the mother.  On this thread the story is told.  The foundling home contacts her employer and between the two of them, bully and shame her into keeping “her” baby.  No matter how the bewildered and irritated Ginger protests, they insist and when she gets her job back permanently with a raise to help her support her child, she decides to just go with the flow.

It’s hard to convince anyone it’s not her baby.  He has taken her to immediately and cries when he is not in her arms, stopping once she holds him.  She grins, dumbfounded as if watching a magician’s trick, “For heaven’s sake!”

The landlady, played by Ferike Boros, likewise assumes she has been hiding the baby from her, and volunteers to help babysit. Later her lawyer son will try to help Ginger try to keep the baby when she’s afraid the boss wants control of his “grandson.”

Frank Albertson, a familiar face from many films, if the parts were usually quite small, gets a larger role here as the annoying stock clerk.  He takes Ginger to a dance contest with disastrous results, and when he also assumes she’s the baby’s mother, assumes that the son of the store owner is the father.  He will use this assumption to get a promotion, and then get revenge when he is demoted again.

The store is one of those old family-owned juggernauts, sadly lost today, run by patriarch Charles Coburn, whose indignation over his playboy son is priceless.  The only sentiment in the movie comes from him, and it is played for laughs, when he thinks his son, David Niven, is the father of the baby and therefore the baby is his grandson.  He holds it lovingly, believes they have named the baby for himself, and he tears up.  It is sweet and laughable.

David Niven, at first an irritant to Ginger, finds himself involved more than he would like, but by New Year’s Eve, without a date for a fancy shindig, he calls her up.  Like a fairy godfather, he provides the suitable gown and accessories from the store.

Love blooms in the end and fixes up the mess, but never in a sentimental way.  In their final embrace before the fade out, Ginger’s “hah!” when Niven affirms he really believes the baby is hers beautifully jabs him as if to say, “you sucker.”

Interestingly, as if to tie up the background of Christmas commercialism in the movie (the toy department is labeled as Santa Claus’s headquarters), there is no musical theme in the movie that reprises the lovers’ bond from scene to scene.  Instead, a toy wind-up duck is seen throughout the movie as the symbol of Ginger’s work (and a funny line about losing sleep and waking because it’s time to wind ducks); a gift to the baby; a foil to Niven, who discovers it breaks and he must try to run the gauntlet in his own store to get a refund; to noisily outing Ginger when she is hiding; to finally quacking away at the end in triumph.  It looks like Donald Duck in a blue sailor suit, but there is no product identification, and perhaps we are looking at a cheap knockoff, a trademark and patent violation.  That, too, is the experience of Christmas.

May I wish you all the very happiest of holidays!

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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.  Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.