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theroseinthedarkness · 1 year

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THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER (1947)

dir.Irving Reis

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divineandmajesticinone · 2 years

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Shirley Temple in THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER (1947) dir. Irving Reis

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the-myrna-loy-blog · 11 months

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Wow! ~ Myrna and Cary.

#Myrna Loy #cary grant #old hollywood #classic hollywood #golden age #beautiful people #The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer #The Myrna Loy Blog

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hellostarrynightblr · 2 years

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Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in The Bachelor and the Boddy-Soxer (1947) dir. Irving Reis

#soulmates

#irving reis #cary grant #myrna loy #1947 #1940s #the bachelor and the bobby-soxer #40s #remember2020 #oldhollywoodedit #classic hollywood #sidney sheldon

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haveyouseenthisromcom · 2 months

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#movies #polls #the bachelor and the bobby-soxer #cary grant #myrna loy #shirley temple #irving reis #ended #result: unheard of

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the-rewatch-rewind · 8 months

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New episode!

Script below the break.

Hello and welcome back to the Rewatch Rewind! My name is Jane, and this is the podcast where I count down my top 40 most frequently rewatched movies in a 20-year period. Today I will be discussing number 12 on my list: RKO and Vanguard Films’ 1947 comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, directed by Irving Reis, written by Sidney Sheldon, and starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Shirley Temple.

This movie is kind of like the Major and the Minor in that it has an incredibly bizarre premise and absolutely would not be made today but is somehow way better than it has any right to be. There is so much going on that I don’t even know how to summarize the plot concisely in a way that will make sense to people who haven’t seen it, but I’ll try.

Judge Margaret Turner (Myrna Loy) is the guardian of her 17-year-old sister Susan (Shirley Temple), who thinks she sentences people too harshly. Perhaps slightly influenced by this, when artist Richard Nugent (Cary Grant) comes before her charged with starting a brawl, she lets him off with a warning, against the urging of assistant district attorney Tommy Chamberlain (Rudy Vallee). That same afternoon, Richard is the guest lecturer at Susan’s school, and she immediately develops a crush on him. After interviewing him for the school paper, Susan decides she needs to model for him, so that evening she gets into his apartment when he’s not there. As soon as he discovers her, Margaret and Tommy show up, assuming Richard was trying to seduce Susan. Richard ends up in jail after punching Tommy. When it becomes clear how deeply Susan has fallen for Richard, the court psychiatrist, Dr. Matt Beemish (Ray Collins), who also happens to be Margaret and Susan’s uncle, convinces the ADA to drop the charges if Richard agrees to date Susan until her infatuation wears off. And then of course, Richard and Margaret start to develop feelings for each other.

I don’t really remember my first impressions of this movie. I think the rest of my family watched it without me before I’d seen it, but I can’t remember if I was busy doing something else or just wasn’t interested. But it didn’t take long for me to start loving it, and that love has never really faded. I watched it twice in 2003, three times in 2004, once in 2005, once in 2006, once in 2009, twice in 2010, three times in 2011, once in 2012, 2013, and each year from 2015 through 2021, and three times in 2022. I’m pretty sure I had also seen it in 2002, because I remember being very into it in 7th grade, which was the 2002-2003 school year. I was in a writing class with one of my best friends, in which we got to write a play together. I must have shown this movie to her by then because we would quote the “You remind me of a man.” “What man?” “The man with the power.” “What power?” “The power of hoodoo.” “Hoodoo?” “You do.” “Do what?” “Remind me of a man.” “What man?” “The man with the power…” etc circular routine so frequently that we had to put it in our play. Now I know that that has also been referenced in other media, but as far as I can tell, it originated in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.

In addition to inventing that silly routine, this script also invented fake slang that I love. Susan likes to say that she’s feeling “sklonklish,” which seems to mean too tired to do anything, which is very much a mood. And then there’s the iconic “Mellow Greetings, Ukie-Dukie” that Susan’s former (and future) boyfriend Jerry White (played by Johnny Sands) teaches Richard, which has been the header on my main Tumblr blog since I started it in 2012. In fact, if you can get past the whole “a court would never order a middle-aged man to date a teenaged girl, wtf” of it all, this movie’s script is surprisingly fabulous, full of great one-line zingers and thoroughly engaging conversations between well-developed characters and several iconic scenes. Sidney Sheldon won an Oscar for the screenplay, which I still kind of can’t believe because goofy movies like this don’t tend to win Academy Awards, but it was definitely deserved. The writing is so excellent that it not only pulls off the ridiculous premise, but it almost makes you forget that the premise was ridiculous in the first place. The characters are written so believably that you don’t want to question them. There are so many great scenes throughout, and the part in the restaurant where it seems like Richard and Margaret might finally get on the same page but keep getting interrupted by more and more characters showing up and the waiters singing “Happy Birthday” and “Happy Anniversary” to a bunch of different people, is still one of the best comedic drama scenes I’ve ever seen.

The script was already incredible on the page, and then it was brought to life by the perfect cast. I’ve already talked about one Cary Grant/Myrna Loy pairing, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, which was made the year after The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and they are equally delightful together in both, although their characters’ dynamic could not have been more different. In Mr. Blandings, while their relationship has some ups and downs, they’re married to each other the whole time, whereas in Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer they embark on a mutual-contempt-to-mutual-admiration journey. And they both play every stage of their relationship flawlessly. They have incredible chemistry, both romantic and comedic, so their scenes together are beautifully entertaining. And then there’s Shirley Temple. This was toward the end of her film career, and you can kind of tell that the studios didn’t really know what to do with her now that she wasn’t a little girl anymore. In many of her earlier films, she played an orphan who managed to charm grumpy older men, and again in this movie she plays an orphan, but now that she’s a teenager, enchanting adults isn’t cute anymore. The older man needs to find it annoying that she’s trying to charm him, otherwise it would be creepy. I’m sure it must have been frustrating for 19-year-old Temple to be essentially typecast in the same kind of role she’d been playing since she was a toddler, except now she’s the obstacle to the main love story rather than the star. But by golly, she sells the heck out of it anyway. She gives Susan the exact blend of silliness and earnestness required to make the character and the story work. She has a very believable sisterly dynamic with Myrna Loy, even though Loy was definitely old enough to be her mother. It’s unclear what their characters’ age gap is supposed to be – we know that Margaret is an established judge while Susan is still in high school, so they have to be pretty far apart, which is kind of odd because Margaret tells Richard that their parents didn’t get married until they were both out of law school, so they must have been rather old when Susan was born, but let’s not overthink it too much. Margaret is clearly torn between trying to be a sister and parent figure to Susan, who doesn’t seem at all interested in making that easier on Margaret, and I love the way Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple play within that tension.

And then there’s the way Susan interacts with Richard. She thinks he’s the most wonderful person she’s ever seen and is initially awestruck. There’s this great moment when they first meet and she dares to lightly touch his arm, and then looks like that’s the most fantastic thing she’s ever done. And then she decides she’s deeply in love with him, and when they start going out, she’s convinced they’re going to end up together. Richard never really knows what to make of Susan, but he tries to keep up with her as best he can. One of my favorite scenes is when Susan is interviewing Richard, and he starts out just giving her vague, bland answers, but when she keeps insisting that he must have had a very interesting life, he starts making up a super dramatic backstory. She hangs on his every word, absolutely eating it up. At one point, he tells her that he used to steal, and she breathlessly asks, “What did you steal?” Richard’s line is “crusts of bread and things,” but Cary Grant gives one of my favorite line deliveries of all time. He starts with saying “crusts of bread” kind of normally, but then he pauses dramatically, leans forward, and puts a lot of emphasis on “and THINGS” and then does this amazing little nod and I love it so much. “Crusts of bread… and THINGS” is one of those random movie lines I quote a lot and nobody knows what I’m talking about. Anyway, there are a bunch of other very entertaining moments between Richard and Susan, like when they’re watching the high school basketball game and Susan’s really getting into the cheers, and at the end of one, she looks at Richard expectantly, so he just goes, “Rah!” with mock enthusiasm, which seems to satisfy her. And of course there’s the “mellow greetings, ukie-dukie” scene when they’re both just saying nonsense fake slang but making it sound like a real conversation. They absolutely should not be dating, but I really enjoy the aspects of their relationship that don’t involve Susan trying to make something romantic happen. I can definitely see them having a fun sibling-in-law dynamic in the future.

It’s funny because I feel like this movie is one of the main things that made me think that I did have a crush on Cary Grant, and it was also one of the main things that convinced me that I didn’t. In my teens and early 20s, I claimed that I loved this movie because I related to Susan having a hopeless crush on Cary Grant. But eventually I realized that I was relating more to the part toward the end when Susan finally realizes that she actually doesn’t like Richard that way. In Susan’s case, it’s because she’s better suited for Jerry, who is literally perfect for her – they talk the same way and have the exact same attitude toward life, and he cares about her so much that he even organizes a group of friends to make Richard win an obstacle race because he knows it will make Susan happy. In my case, it meant facing the fact that I was probably never going to like anyone that way, despite society’s myths about soulmates and amatonormativity and such, which is perhaps why it took me decades to figure out what Susan learned in a few days. This movie, like most, is very amatonormative, but I think it does a pretty good job of demonstrating that being in awe of someone is not the same thing as being in love with them. The first time Susan sees Richard, she imagines him in shining armor, and immediately puts him on a pedestal. Even if there hadn’t been an inappropriate age difference between them, that kind of relationship is not sustainable. Margaret, too, imagines Richard in armor, but that’s after she’s gotten to know him. She initially saw him as a common criminal, then saw him briefly as a gallant knight, and is mature enough to conclude that he’s just a normal person in between those two, and that’s part of why I feel like their relationship has a future.

While I love most of the characters in this movie, there are two that bother me. One is Dr. Beemish, aka Uncle Matt, and the other is Tommy Chamberlain, aka the assistant district attorney. Dr. Beemish does play an important role in getting Richard and Margaret together, but I don’t know why he has to be so slimy about it. Part of what I don’t like about him is he’s way too focused on Margaret getting married. Before Richard even enters the story, Matt responds to Margaret putting on her judge’s robes with, “Exit woman, enter judge. More’s the pity.” And it’s just like, excuse me, she can be a judge and a woman! It feels like the movie was trying to say, “We’re progressive, but not that progressive” and I hate it. Although Matt does add at the end of that scene that he’s more interested in making sure she marries the right man than making sure she gets married at all, which I guess is nice, though I’m not sure why he’s appointed himself in charge of that. Margaret can find the right man for herself. But to be fair, he did say that in response to Tommy giving her a present, which, like, I’m sorry, but it seems very weird to me that Tommy and Margaret are kind of sort of dating at the beginning of the movie. Like, I’m not an expert on judiciary ethics, but an assistant district attorney dating a judge feels like a major conflict of interest. I guess the idea was that if they got married, she would just… quit? I don’t know, but I don’t like it, which is why I forgive Uncle Matt for trying to steer Margaret away from Tommy and toward Richard. I do think Dr. Beemish should lose his job, and possibly his medical license, for telling the police that Tommy’s a mental patient of his who thinks he’s an assistant district attorney, even though that scene is very funny and Tommy does kind of deserve it. What I’m trying to say is, this movie is far from perfect, but none of its flaws make me love it any less.

I do think it’s a little ironic that this movie made such a big deal about how inappropriate it would be for Cary Grant to date someone as much younger than him as Shirley Temple was, and then in Father Goose he played opposite Leslie Caron, who was born three years after Shirley Temple was. I mean, that movie was made 17 years after Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and as I mentioned in that episode, age gaps are significantly less disturbing when the younger partner is over 30. But still. Given that Cary Grant would now be 119 years old, it’s kind of wild to me that some of his costars are still alive. (Shirley Temple is sadly not one of them, rest in peace, but Leslie Caron is.) But at least in this movie, Grant’s main leading lady was only a year younger than him. I also think it’s kind of funny that the movie establishes that Richard is 18 years older than Susan, when Grant was actually 24 years older than Temple, especially because Susan was two years younger than Temple. It just goes to show that Hollywood has been messing with people’s perceptions of age for a very long time. I’ve always been more interested in age from a numerical perspective than an existential perspective, and I often forget that most people in this society view aging past adulthood as inherently negative, at least until one reaches a particularly impressive old age. As of this week, I am over a third of the way to 100 years old, which realistically probably means I’m more than a third of the way through my life, but my brain is far more interested in going, “Ooh, 33.33333…infinite threes!” than pondering my mortality. But I’ve learned that that is unusual, and a lot of people get offended if you bring up their age, which is part of why I tend to focus my interest in people’s ages on past movie stars who are either deceased or beyond the point where age becomes a badge of honor again.

Anyway, thank you for spending some of your limited time on earth listening to me discuss another of my most frequently rewatched movies. Next week I’ll be talking about the other Cary Grant movie I watched 25 times while I was keeping track, which is one in which he starred opposite an actress who was significantly younger than him, although she was born a few years before Shirley Temple, and who is, knock on wood, as far as I know at the time of recording, currently the oldest living Oscar winner. So stay tuned, and as always, I will leave you with a quote from that next movie: “Seven parking tickets.”

#the bachelor and the bobby-soxer #cary grant #myrna loy #shirley temple #the rewatch rewind

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classic80sand90smovieloves2 · 2 years

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Listen, I know: Cary Grant, Cary Grant, Cary Grant. But what about HIM~

#the bachelor and the Bobby-soxer

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letterboxd-loggd · 1 year

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The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (Bachelor Knight) (1947) Irving Reis

November 19th 2022

#the bachelor and the bobby-soxer #bachelor knight #1947 #irving reis #shirley temple #cary grant #myrna loy #rudy vallee #ray collins #johnny sands #harry davenport #suddenly it's spring

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masorad · 10 months

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#The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer #Fando Y Lis #Repulsion #Dead of Night #I Walked With a Zombie

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visplay · 2 years

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Chris: In this comedy drama, Cary Grant gets stuck chaperoning a young woman, he is as bubbly as usual, this has been remastered, and is mainly for Cary Grant fans, but note the cast of Myrna Loy and Shirley Temple, Watch: On Subscription Service.

#movie review #the bachelor and the Bobby-soxer

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citizenscreen · 5 months

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Now watching on TCM

#cary grant #myrna loy #shirley temple #the bachelor and the bobby soxer #classic movies #old hollywood

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cinematicfinatic · 2 days

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Shirley Temple and Cary Grant .... The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer

#Shirley Temple #cary grant #the bachelor and the bobby soxer #classic movies #classic hollywood

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jojoblessed365 · 7 months

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popping into people's asks this morning!

what's your favorite film of all time that you want everyone you know to watch and enjoy?

Hi there!

So uh, I guess if anyone has seen my blog, I'm a sucker for classics, and I don't have one favourite film of all time. So I'll give you 3:

1. The Apartment (1960)

This is by far the funniest and darkest film I've ever seen- the harsh reality of wanting what makes us happy in exchange for our morals is the theme of the movie and is handled quite deftly by Billy Wilder. I think this is my Casablanca preference and everyone has to watch this movie at least once.

2. The Bachelor and The Bobby Soxer (1947)

Cary Grant should've made more than just 3 movies with Myrna Loy, that's all I'll say about this one.

3. Holiday (1938)

This movie is an eye opener for a lot of us in today's day and age- what constitutes "living" is the core question and Cary Grant's character is a phenomenal guy. Plus we get to see some acrobats and some really lovey dovey expressions.

Thanks once again @disasterbiwriter

P.S. I wanted to consider adding The Heiress, but I doubt people would really enjoy it so ... but it's a wonderful movie and Olivia De Havilland is exceptional as always

#asks #favourite films #the apartment 1960 #the bachelor and the bobby soxer #holiday 1938 #the heiress 1949 #olivia de havilland #cary grant #myrna loy #billy wilder

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the-myrna-loy-blog · 1 year

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Detail of a portrait of Myrna Loy and Cary Grant for the film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.

#Cary Grant #Myrna Loy #The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer #old hollywood #glamour photography #Golden Age of Hollywood #beautiful people #The Myrna Loy Blog

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helloparkerrose · 1 year

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#1940s #shirley temple #old hollywood #icon #child star #young starlet #kathleen #the bachelor and the bobby soxer #fort apache #the blue bird #the little princess #baby take a bow

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thebestestwinner · 1 year

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Top two vote-getters will move on to the next round. See pinned post for all groups!

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