George Stevens puts three strangers in one small Washington flat and gets more warmth, and more heat, out of a shared bathroom than most romances manage in a bedroom. The last half hour turns to farce and loses its footing, and we did not much mind.
In wartime Washington there were more people than beds, and George Stevens’s comedy builds an entire film out of one flat with one bathroom. It is among the warmest comedies of its era, and one scene on a front step at night is the frankest thing Hollywood managed under the Production Code without anybody removing a stitch. It is also a film that runs out of ideas about people in its last half hour and replaces them with plot. That is the caveat; the recommendation is unreserved.
Constance Milligan (Jean Arthur) has organised her life so tightly that she need never think about it. She has a fiancé, Charles J. Pendergast (Richard Gaines), a government man who is safe in every sense, and she has a timetable on the wall that divides the morning into minutes. Into this walks Benjamin Dingle (Charles Coburn), a rich old man who needs a room and simply refuses to hear the word no. He then lets half of his half to Joe Carter (Joel McCrea), a serviceman with a few days before he goes overseas, and the timetable falls apart before breakfast.
Coburn is the reason the first hour works. Dingle’s motto is “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”, and Coburn plays him as a man who has spent seventy years being obeyed and finds it funny that it still works. The morning sequence, in which two men who have never met try to share a bathroom, a coffee pot and a corridor to Connie’s schedule, is almost wordless, and Otto Meyer cuts it to the rhythm of somebody who is late for everything. We laughed out loud, and then laughed again at our own reflection when Dingle got his trousers caught.
Arthur and McCrea have the harder part, which is to fall in love in a flat with no privacy while pretending not to. Arthur’s voice, which always sounds as though it is about to crack and never does, is the film’s best instrument; she delivers Connie’s lists of Pendergast’s virtues at speed, as if saying them quickly will make them matter. McCrea does very little and does it slowly, which is exactly right against her. The scene on the front step is the one everyone remembers, and they are right. Connie talks and talks about her fiancé while Joe’s hand finds her shoulder, then her arm, then the back of her neck, and she keeps talking. Stevens holds the shot and lets it run. We were not ready for how much it carries; we found we were holding our breath, in a comedy, over two people sitting on a step.
Ted Tetzlaff shoots the flat so that we always know exactly how little room there is. Doors open into people; a man in a doorway blocks a whole scene; the camera sits in the corridor and waits. Leigh Harline’s music is light and stays mostly out of the way, which is the correct decision for a comedy this dependent on timing. Nothing in the film is showy, and everything in it is placed.
Four writers are credited, Robert Russell, Frank Ross, Richard Flournoy and Lewis R. Foster, and in the last half hour you can feel all four of them. A diary is read, a misunderstanding grows, three FBI agents (Bruce Bennett, Frank Sully and Don Douglas) arrive with a senator (Clyde Fillmore) and a teenage boy (Stanley Clements), and the film stops being about three people in a flat and becomes about getting everyone to the right place at the right time. We will not describe where it goes. It is competent farce, and it is sentimental in a way the first hour never is, and at 104 minutes the film is at its best when nothing is happening except a queue for the bathroom.
Stevens had made Swing Time, Woman of the Year and The Talk of the Town before this, and he went off to film the war soon after and never made anything this light again. Seen that way, this is the last of a run, and it has the ease of a director who knows the form completely and has not yet stopped enjoying it.
Watch it with someone you could share a bathroom with, and pay attention to the front step. Everything after it is a bonus, and some of it is a chore.
