Bachelor Mother

1939 romantic comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A woman who works in a department store finds an abandoned infant and winds up having to be his mother in order to keep her job.

Never has child abandonment been funnier than in this movie!

I watched this because it's on my brother-in-law Cory's top-ten list from 1939, but I didn't have high expectations. But holy mackerel! It was a delightful gem of a movie with charming lead performances from Ginger Rogers and David Niven and lots of very funny moments. It made me long for a time when people used words like "holy mackerel" and "corny" or when women all had alliterative names.

Man, they sure get a lot of mileage out of these wind-up Donald Duck toys. Though I'm sure 1930's department stores really did employ women to stand at a counter and wind up duck toys all day, it's still a little hard to believe. Those ducks were superimposed over a work montage, came into play again when one is decapitated, and even had a major role to play in the film's climax. Donald Duck's even in the credits, and so is voice actor Clarence Nash who voiced the irritable, pants-free fowl.

The cast list also tells me that Elbert Coplen Jr. played the baby. Now that's a performance! I'm willing to bet Coplen had his parents leave him somewhere so that he could really understand this character's background. He's the Daniel-Day Lewis of baby actors. Surprisingly, this was Coplen's only role.

Speaking of babies, there's a point when Niven gives the advice, "Why not have it sleep on its stomach?" This was a fairly popular movie, I think, and you have to wonder how many occurrences of Infant Death Syndrome were because mothers trusted the screenplay.

Do I buy all the relationships in this movie? People sure fell in love easily during this decade, and there's another moment where Rogers says, "Nobody can come between you and me" to the baby which was absurd since they'd had about 30 seconds of shared screen time at that point. But the comedy is so charming that I guess I can forgive all of that.