THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR

This romantic comedy was the directorial debut of Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote it.  Later in his career he would achieve comedy immortality with the idea of men masquerading as women, in ‘Some Like It Hot’.  Here to rather less comic effect he has Ginger Rogers pretending to be a 12-year old in order to pay the train fare home.  

Not that it’s a bad film; quite the contrary it has its fair share of funny lines and the somewhat farcical plot is neatly developed and then resolved. It features an unusual setting in the second half, of a military school.  

Considering that Wilder is often criticised for being tasteless he manages to avoid all the pitfalls inherent in the basic setup, he even gets away with Susan and the Major, Philip, (played by Ray Milland) sleeping in separate beds in a railway compartment.  I was amused that when Susan says she has been warned about strangers Philip thinks that merely introducing himself gets over that problem.

But this highlights one of the film’s problems.  In order to avoid any issues with the Hays Code Philip is portrayed as so naive and innocent as to make him an unexciting romantic lead, and making it highly implausible that Susan would fall in love with him at all, let alone as quickly as she does.

Even without this problem this romantic comedy doesn’t get to even first base for the obvious reason that Philip goes through the entire film blissfully unaware that Su-Su (as he irritatingly calls her) is an adult woman.

Throughout the story I was wondering what his reaction would be when he discovers the truth but Wilder delays this moment until literally the last scene when quite absurdly Susan simultaneously reveals her true age and proposes to him - to which he readily agrees without a moment’s hesitation.

It’s an appropriate ending I guess for something not intended to be more than an entertaining piece of fluff.