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).
Review of The Major and the Minor
