The Major and the Minor

source: The Major and the Minor

Ginger Rogers plays Susan Applegate who wants to leave New York behind and go back home to Iowa.But she doesn't have the railway fare so she disguises herself as a 12 year old girl to ride half fare.At the train she meets Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland) who takes "the little girl" with him to military school.There little Susu is surrounded by all the boys because she is a knock out for a 12 year old. The Major and the Minor from 1942 is a Billy Wilder comedy with some funny moments.It's not his best work but it is much better than many comedies nowadays.Ginger Rogers is brilliant in the lead.She makes a great kid even though she doesn't seem like a kid.In 1955 they made a remake for this called You're Never Too Young with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, which was also funny.This movie is a must see for every Billy Wilder fan because this was his American debut.

It would be nice to be able to say that 'The Major and the Minor' is one of those great debut films of the early 1940s, of the same vintage as 'Citizen Kane' and 'The Maltese Falcon'. The truth is, despite being thoroughly amiable, frequently risque, and always clever, Wilder's first film is simply not funny enough. Perhaps the fault lies in the casting - is Ginger Rogers to wisecrackingly knowing to fully exploit such a perverse role? Is the film's perversity too lightly handled? i think the problem is the recurring Wilder problem, that of too many words. One is left breathless, but a little oppressed, at the continuous barrage of gags, wisecracks, puns, sarcasms that fitfully hit their target. It is significant that the film's funniest sequence, when the cadet Susan has hoodwinked returns to his abandoned post lost in music, in the presence of his superiors, is a purely visual one, depending on resources other than the word: expectation, incongruity, physical humour. It is more eloquent of all Wilder's themes - the limits on humanity under authoritarian systems; the generation and gender gap; the transformative power or otherwise of art - than a hundred perfectly honed jokes. Still, the film is notable in that it serves as a fully formed statement of intent. Or rather; there have always been two impulses in Wilder - the ironic, yet enchanting, adult fairy tale, and the corrosively bitter melodrama, which, in its most hysterical form tended towards a Gothic melodrama not too far from the first. 'Major' is pure fairy tale - Susan is transformed (there is an elaborate scene of metamorphosis, appropriately, at a train station) from a failed woman into a wildly popular young girl; she steals the handsome prince from a grasping shrew; she spends a fairy-tale three days in an enchanted space, where normality, order, hierarchy are all suspended or overturned; she even chooses to reveal herself wearing an 'Arabian Nights'-like costume. Susan's 'time-transference' allows her to become a subversive sprite, although an earlier tussle with Osborne (the immortal Robert Benchley) suggests that she is not the sort of person to simply take things as she finds them. But the idea that a little girl can disrupt a rigidly ordered military base on the eve of war IS subversive, culminating in the glorious switchboard sequence. She does more than this - she changes the status quo - a hick girl who has blown all her prospects is able to infiltrate the military elite and overturn an arranged marriage, a deliberately conceived continuance of tradition. She takes Kirby out of this crippling environment, out of an enchanted land and the witch that would keep him there, even though she herself has magical powers that allow her to change appearance and age at will. She uncovers the sexual neurosis at the heart of the military project, rightly comparing the Fall of France to a sexual violation, but also suggesting that the mechanised disciplining of human beings only leads to the kind of physical repression that is betrayed by physical symptoms like Kirby's dodgy eye. When Susan leans against an erect cannon, trying to ward off pubescent boys for whom military advances are sexual advances, we know what's happening, especially as she met Kirby on a derailed train, that Freudian engine, which, along with Susan's disguise as a female caricature, prefigures Wilder's masterpiece, 'Some Like It Hot', and which, when the relationship is finally sorted out, and about to be consummated, is so at a train station. There is a melancholy twist to this fairy tale - Susan gets her prince at the moment he leaves, perhaps never to return, like the millions of men soon to be mobilised in the war effort. Wilder's portrait of Pamela audaciously suggests that not every woman will selflessly stand by her man, pointing to the misogyny of film noir and its treacherous women.

This Billy Wilder film stars Ginger Rogers as a grown thirty year old woman passing herself off as a twelve year old kid, PLEASE!! The storyline is unbelievable BUT....made very funny and watchable by its stars. Susan is a woman who is fed up with New York. She left her little hometown to find happiness in the big city, only to find it filled with disappointment. So she decides to head back home on the train. When she gets there she finds that she is short funds. Not knowing what to do she gets a hairbrained idea that she could simply pass herself off as a kid to pay less!! When the conductor on the train gets wise, she runs and hides in the compartment of Ray Milland. Ginger makes little SuSu(Susan) so cute and delightful and Milland is funny and sweet as the(obviously blind) military school teacher. It sounds stupid but it isn't really. Give it a chance and you'll love it. ENJOY!!

This one misfired entirely. The idea that Ginger Rogers could dress up as a child and pretend to be twelve years old is ridiculous in the ghoulish and horrible sense, not in an amusing way at all. She becomes a kind of Frankenminor, a monstrosity more imposthume than impostor. One wants to throw up. And then she meets the dour Ray Milland, who may make a good lead in a menacing thriller, but when it comes to interacting with kids, forget it. Milland was in real life so fantastically mean with money that he would always stick a travelling companion with the cab fare, pretending he had forgotten his wallet, as I was told by victims of this tactic. A man who cannot bring himself to spare a nickel is equally ungenerous with his affections, so Milland has about as much ability to relate to a 'child' as a mole could relate to an eagle (one living underground, the other in the clouds, and in Milland's case, he was the mole). Milland and Rogers have about as much chemistry between them as two rocks. This film is just a ludicrous attempt to cheer up the American public during the early stages of the War. Men watching must have been driven to enlist, if only to escape such drivel, and women watching would have been glad they were not twelve, if twelve is a woman in a school hat with a silly voice. This was Billy Wilder's first pathetic attempt to make something that was funny. Even Robert Benchley could not manage to raise a laugh, so the lead balloons were everywhere, tied to everyone's ankles by a misconceived project, an inane script based on an obviously very silly play, and inadequate direction. Perhaps this was the kind of target the Japanese were really after: bad movies, but they only got as far as Pearl Harbour, about which many bad movies were later made (excepting always the wonderful 'The Winds of War' TV series of 1983, one the finest series ever made for television).

The enjoyable performances do a lot to help this film rise above average, and they are what initially made me love this movie. And even though the basic plot seemed to be mere fluff to me when I first saw it, I'm now persuaded that this movie definitely runs deeper. After reading other comments here that delved into the themes, I thought of a particular scene that struck me as odd when I first watched this. At the station, when Ginger first gets the idea to pose as a child, a mother is looking at magazines with her two children- a boy and a girl. The young daughter insists on buying a movie magazine and reads aloud from the cover, "Why I hit women, by Charles Boyer." The way the child says this and the very fact that this particular line is included just stayed in my mind as I watched this film. Others commented on how Ginger's character is always suffering predatory advances- both as an adult and as an eleven year old. Now I see it differently when I think of the scene where Ray Milland is looking at her with one eye closed and telling her what a knock-out he can tell she'll be in a few years. Well of course, he's really looking at a 30 year old, but he believes she's a child and I think this really brings up issues of how sexualized (and maybe preyed upon ?)women are at any age, whether they are adults or children. Well, that really makes this an odd and interesting movie, mixing some risqué topics with highly enjoyable, light-hearted fluff!

This has been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it as a young teen becoming addicted to the wit and charm of so many of the films of the 30's and 40's. I loved it for its humor, for Rogers' combination of sass, guts and tenderness, and for the way it winked at its own unlikely premise. I'd never given a lot of thought to the Lolita-esqe subtext addressed by many here. What strikes me about it now is that it's just one element of the theme of sex-as-potential-exploitation that's woven throughout--from the ogling of Susan in New York, to her unpleasant encounter with Benchley, to her exhausting attempts to avoid male teenage libidos at the military academy. What makes Wilder's treatment of that theme so wonderful, and perhaps why his films are not merely shallowly risqué, is the way that potential is just observed, rather than being the whole point of the movie. The point instead, in this film as in his later ones, is the capacity of mature, clear-eyed adults to navigate past sexual predators and through their own cynicisms to find love. POSSIBLE MINI-SPOILER: That theme is epitomized for me in this film in that last scene where Rogers is gloriously, luminously revealed as an adult, taking charge of her life and sexuality with eyes and heart wide open. I think that's really why I love this film. That, and the fact that it's charming and hilarious.

"The Major and The Minor" is director, Billy Wilder's, first directorial movie, and it was a hit. About 90% of Billy Wilder's comedies were hits. It's an adorable story about a New York City working girl (Ginger Rogers) wanting to go home to Iowa, but not having enough money for the train fare so she goes as a minor (12 years old). Along the way, she meets a Major from a boys military school (Ray Milland) and gets involved with his life unintentionly and falls in love. It is an unusual story, but it works. The chemistry between Rogers and Milland is perfection. They made a great team. In 1944, they made another terrific movie, "Lady in the Dark", which was a comedy with musical numbers. This was Ginger Rogers' best movie and Ray Milland was her best leading man. They complimented each other. Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland had something in common, they could do comedy and drama easily. Not many actors can do that. My favorite thing about this movie is the romance, but the next thing I liked is the supporting actress, Rita Johnson, who was a superb villain in comedies. She was always fighting to get the guy. I won't say the movie is dated but you do notice the movie represents the 1940's during the war years; it shows how the people looked and acted differently than they do today.

Okay, the audience is supposed to accept that Ginger Rogers, aged 31 at the time, is posing at an adolescent! This is patently ridiculous and if anyone could possibly pull this off, Miss Rogers was NOT the one! Had the film starred a very young-looking and less developed lady (such as Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn circa 1952), perhaps it wouldn't have seemed so ridiculous, but here it just makes the common-sense part of me want to scream. I just hate films with bad premises and bad casting--and I am not sure ANY actress could make this premise work. Oddly, this dopey plot was repeated a decade later when Jerry Lewis took on this same role--and he was 29 at the time! While Billy Wilder is a now huge name in directing, at the time he had no reputation in Hollywood so he was stuck with this utterly stupid casting decision. Had he been given this assignment later in his illustrious assume he would have likely refused such a ridiculous premise! The silly plot occurs because Ginger is trying to buy a train ticket but the rate has recently changed. However, the child fare is half-price and so she decides to pose as a kid!! On board, the conductors naturally assume she's an adult but oddly, Ray Milland is an apparent idiot and has no idea she's NOT a child!!!! So, since he's a gullible idiot, Ginger hangs out in his private room during the entire trip. However, when Milland's fiancée sees Ginger in his room later, she naturally assumes that this 31 year-old woman is a 31 year-old woman!! But, to convince his fiancée and future father-in-law that she is only a child and nothing inappropriate occurred, he brings Ginger with him to meet them at the military school. And, oddly, when they meet Ginger, they immediately assume that she is 12!!! This is dumb AND creepy--after all, it's better that she's a 31 year-old than a pre-pubescent female riding with a strange man!!! Now whether or not this is a watchable film just depends on how a able you will be to accept the premise. If you can somehow manage to not only believe the plot but also ignore all the creepy implications, the film is a lot of fun...and even romantic (especially at the end). I guess I just couldn't do this and the movie, despite its pluses, just didn't work for me. I couldn't get past Ginger's casting, her ridiculous impersonation of a child (calling it 'broad' or a 'burlesque' is way too charitable) and that Milland's character might just be a pedophile--a very problematic plot to say the least!

Billy Wilder's directorial debut is one of the American cinema's classic screwball comedies. Ginger Rogers is electric as the blue-collar gal whose adventures begin when she dresses herself up as a youngster so she can afford to ride home on the train (she only has half-fare). Robert Benchley heads a magnificent supporting cast, and Ray Milland acts his role to a "tee." If you've never seen this, you are in for a treat.