COLUMBIA Studio’s freshener, which annually features Jean Arthur, wholesome comedy and a part of the American scene, is this summer called “The More the Merrier,” and is getting frayed at the edges. This product is like an air-conditioner, in that on the hottest day of the year it is better than no conditioner at all. There is a certain foolproof quality about it: each line produces some kind of smile, even if it takes all the smart dialogue writers in Hollywood; the people who play in it are invigorating, and all fitted out to look their handsomest. There is nothing in this formula that is vulgar or unnecessarily trite.
“The More the Merrier” takes place in Washington, D. C., but utilizes few of the farcical possibilities of living there. As a patriotic gesture, Miss Arthur, formerly of the Office of Facts and Figures, rents half her apartment to a housing man, Charles Coburn, who rents half of his half to a propellor man, Joel McCrea, for six dollars. Mr. Coburn does this because, aside from being a millionaire who wants factory workers’ houses built closer to factories and a man who says, “Damn the torpedoes—full speed ahead!” over and over again, he is a Cupid.
Anyone who has lived in Washington can tell you it is a joke on the human race (where government buildings are of a hugeness beyond comprehension, like the nebulae; where one stenographer is known to have moved twenty-three times in six weeks in a mistaken search for privacy; where millions enter the city daily, and the city, to accommodate them, has the millions already there move over a little bit—it is beyond the worst anxiety dream of a sardine before reaching its can). In deference to this exaggerated place of habitation, a comedy about it should have been a huge, frenzied belly laugh: but “The More the Merrier” is little more than a smile and much too light treading.
The movie cuts along quickly, at its best, when it is directly concerned with its scene. The apartment Miss Arthur splits with Coburn is four-square and barren in the true Washington interpretation of the Colonial style. Inside it, Miss Arthur, more spinsterish than usual, arranges out of her background of facts and figures a schedule to get both her and Mr. Coburn out of the house by seven-thirty. This ends up, as it deserves to, with Mr. Coburn on the fire escape (newspaper picked up at 7:01 in one hand and the coffee pot, to be put on at 7:03 in the other) begging to be let in again. Next Mr. McCrea appears, with his propellor from California, some bright lines to trade with Coburn, and a nice parody of a man practising the rumba. All of this, though not boisterous, is decidedly not unfunny. After this point the picture starts running contrariwise to its title, slugging poignancy and Miss Arthur to a bad end. This new train of thought is brought on by a need to prove Miss Arthur, who marries McCrea after only two days’ acquaintance, truly in love, and not promiscuous.
It is also brought on by the incompatibility of Director George Stevens’ real talent with the requirements of farce. His flair is for directing people so that they come out as natural, warm, bright, middle-class Americans, whose lives have tact and poignancy and not too much laughter (“Alice Adams,” “Penny Serenade”). It is shown in this picture in his concern for the small, compassionate moments such as the one in which the young man gives Miss Arthur, after she has kicked him out, the hundred-percent-all-leather-double-duty traveling bag, and her legitimate dismay, on returning from her honeymoon, to find she has forgotten to take it. Director Stevens’ troubles always arise in a comedy of this sort where his compassion collides, head-on, with slapstick. This gums the last half of the picture with tendernesses that fall flat, and laughs that break wrong.
But inconclusive as “The More the Merrier” is, it has a buoyant quality; it is definitely engaging and not at all a waste of anyone’s time.
June 28, 1943