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Timing is the thing in comedy, so it goes for the wartime gentleman with the bum eye, "it seems I'm always off schedule 20 or 30 years." Done with being pawed and pinched, the scalp masseuse (Ginger Rogers) smashes an egg on New York's lecherous forehead and heads home to Iowa. Faced with an overpriced ticket, she ducks into the ladies' room, towels off her makeup and flattens her curves et voilà, half-priced fare for the pigtailed nymphet. Porters aren't convinced by the disguise ("Looks kinda filled out for twelve." "We have some kind of gland trouble in the family"), but the Army major (Ray Milland) is readily beguiled by the "child" seeking refuge in his compartment. The line is from big-city wolves to the hormonal galaxy of cadet school, her ally in the whirl of "grown-up foolishness" is the wised-up student (Diana Lynn) who knows her biology. "I was in hot water before, but now it's boiling oil!" Billy Wilder's own graduation from screenwriter to director is wryly observed (the tadpole has to lose its tail, notes the science-inclined teenager), his heroine leans on an erect cannon and contemplates a ballroom teeming with of mini-Veronica Lakes. Lubitsch is the wise model (cf. Robert Benchley's hair-pulling recognition of the bobby-soxer on the dance floor), Diertele's Portrait of Jennie is an unmistakable echo. To fall in love here is to fall between planes of identity, so that a woman can tease the goatish male gaze as both hounded jailbait and graying matriarch before the self can be finally revealed. "I went to a masquerade, darling." Nabokov undoubtedly remembers much of this, above all Rogers on the porch with circling moths and "Dream Lover." With Rita Johnson, Frankie Thomas, Edward Fielding, and Lela E. Rogers. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |