THE most glamorous current film subject—high-school life in the days of the Charleston, pencil-shaped female torsos, vo-do-de-oh-do and decrepit college dress—is found in “Margie,” a gentle, molasses-toned bit of Americana on the order of “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “State Fair.” The movie starts restfully in the attic of a high-school principal’s dream house, with a self-possessed young matron, Margie (Jeanne Crain, having more trouble looking thirtyish than she does looking sixteen in the flashback), and her bobby-sox daughter going over photographs of the mother’s high-school days. As she describes, with a grown-up’s boredom, Rudy Vallee, flagpole sitters and goldfish eaters, the movie flashes back to wintry scenes at Central High in 1928 when Margie was a wispy, oppressed romantic, an elevated type who would like to be either a jazz baby or the Lady of Shalott. Margie carries on like an ethereal mouse, envying her hot-cha pal, Marybelle (Barbara Lawrence), who is on a merry-go-round of necking and Charlestoning with a raccoon coat named Johnnikins (Conrad Janis). The person who answers Margie’s romantic yearnings is the new French teacher (Glenn Langan—a Nelson Eddy type with all its limitations), a man who studied in Paris. After some soul-torturing incidents with this Mr. Fontayne, involving the broken elastic of Margie’s bloomers which causes them to fall down when she gets excited, and also an unfulfilled fantasy that he is going to take her to the senior prom, the movie ends at the prom with Margie making a hit with both Mr. Fontayne and Johnnikins.
While the treatment is sentimental, sophisticated, New Yorkerish and has a cheapened Fitzgeraldian sparkle, it is delicate and sympathetic on the subject of Margie’s shy, tortured adolescence and is almost shrewd about the rest of the characters. The direction (Henry King) is sensitive to young girlisms; it tries in a candid and erotic way to express Margie’s girlish sensuality by deliberate, youthfully idealized photography of her romantic posturings; her decorous walk is an effective caricature of the ladylike walk of a girl who has been raised too idealistically, and she is constantly wriggling as though her clothes hampered her. The most subtle aspect of the film is the way the romantic quality of both the period and the girl is washed over the screen, particularly in scenes—an ice-skating party, the prom waltz, fantasy-laden moments in her room—where Margie’s melting, Victorian dream world seems to transform the people around her.
“Margie” abounds in traditional characters who are made to seem much more significant than usual by shrewdness of writing or acting. The flylike father (Hobart Cavanaugh) is made less mechanical by an emphasis on his passionate reserve and gentility and also by Cavanaugh’s ability to make you feel that more is going on inside him than you have been led to expect from this type in the past. Johnnikins is supposed to be the perennial collegiate from College Humor, Judge, John Held Jr. drawings and Harold Teen, with his pork-pie hat, dirty cords and arrogant slouch, but the performance by Conrad Janis brings him closer to a sort of jiving, energetic lounge lizard with a touch of earnestness and warmth.
The movie is so superficially placed in its Charleston era that if you like the period you’ll wait for the copies which Warners and MGM will undoubtedly bring out.
November 11, 1946