The Major and the Minor
This was Billy Wilder’s first film as a director. It is also a real education in just how much the world had changed in 70 years. Ginger Rogers doesn’t have enough money to take the train home, so she dresses down and pretends to be 12 to qualify for the youth fare, but the conductors aren’t buying it when they catch her smoking. (No 12-year-old could possibly smoke in 1942! Unthinkable!) Eluding them, she blunders into Major Ray Milland’s room and convinces him she is too frightened to go back to her seat in coach. He insists she stay in his room, using the lower berth. The train stalls, and Ray’s fiancée boards it and finds this strange girl in his room, storms out. Back at the military academy where the Major works, the board is all set to can his philandering ass when he proudly presents his alibi: She’s only 12! What a collective sigh of relief! Board is happy, fiancée is happy … who could possibly not be happy to learn a 40-year-old man has just spent the night with a 12-year-old girl not his sister or daughter in a tiny train compartment …
It is simply impossible to imagine that scenario today. If a 12-year-old entered my room I would rip the door off its hinges before even talking to her, which I would do from the corridor outside the room, keeping my hands firmly in my pockets. It looks so weird to us today, that you just have to wonder. Remember, this movie was passed on by the Hayes Office, the Legion of Decency, and who knows how many other censorship bodies, and given a clean bill of health. How could this be? Did the question of pedophilia not even arise? I realized that was precisely the case. It was too ridiculous to contemplate! That a good-looking, amiable, proper gentleman in a uniform could in any way do anything indecent … well, you must have a very dirty mind to even think about it. Child molesters (if such things even exist, and we do not talk about them) are slobbering, filthy, wild-eyed monsters, easy to spot. Certainly poor, certainly of the lower classes, possibly Irish, or more likely, Negro … you know how those people are …
Other than that creepiness from today’s perspective, which it takes a while to get used to, this is a very good film. That anybody could mistake Ginger Rogers for 12 is, of course, ludicrous, but it’s a tradition that dates back at least to Shakespeare. A girl puts her hair up under her hat, she can pass for a boy, as in Sullivan’s Travels. (There’s a great visual joke here, concerning the local girls’ school who have all just seen a Veronica Lake movie … and we cut to a shot of dozens of young women sitting in a row, each with her hair combed over one side of her face.) Sexy Ginger can wear socks and flat shoes and a little jumper and pigtails and presto! She’s 12! Ginger Rogers is one of my favorite actresses of the time, even when she doesn’t dance, and she gets all the good lines here.