Since romantic comedies today have such an understandably bad reputation, it is easy to forget that in the 1930's and 40's extremely entertaining romantic comedies often flowed out of Hollywood on a seeming regular basis. These films were full of a seeming effortless type of charm that populated so many movies of that era. Bachelor Mother was one of those movies.
Earlier in the year this film came out Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers made a movie together called The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. After completion of that movie it was decided that the popular duo would go separate ways career wise and each would make movies without the other. This is Ginger Rodgers' first film after that. After reading the screenplay Rodgers worried that her character would not be considered likable. However producer, Pandro Berman told her this would not happen and she agreed to do the film. However she still remained worried about this. Her costar would be David Niven, who at this time was not the star he would later become, and in fact this was only his fourth film role. The director for the film would be Garson Kanin, who though the next year would direct My Favorite Wife is better remembered as a writer (he would later write The More the Merrier, A Double Life and Adam's Rib). Kanin's career was also get started around this time.
The story begins one Christmas season when Polly (Played by Ginger Rodgers) gets fired from her job in a department store. She finds a small baby boy (played by Elbert Coplen Jr.) in the street and brings it into the orphanage. The people working at the orphanage think that Polly is his mother. They convince her boss David (played by David Niven) to give her the job back so she can take care of the baby. David does that and gives Polly the baby as a Christmas gift. David goes often to help her with the baby and ends up falling in love with Polly.
This movie was based off a story by Felix Jackson. That story had been filmed once before in Germany as a 1935 movie called Kleine Mutti (which translates to Little Mother). The story would be made into another movie later in 1956 called Bundle of Joy.
This is a movie of irrespirable charm. The charisma between Ginger Rodgers and David Niven is fantastic and you believe ever second of film they spend together. The jokes are really funny, and consist of that classic fast paced clever dialogue that populated so many Hollywood movies of this era. More than anything though this movie just has great energy and is a lot of fun. For all classic movie fans this is a must watch. I am definitely not the only person to love this film. It was a huge box office hit and critics loved it as well.
A Donald Duck toy ends up playing a surprisingly big role in this movie. This is because at this time RKO (the studio which this film was made for) was currently distributing all of Walt Disney's film output including the Donald Duck shorts, making this a bit of self promotion. There is a great gag at the end of the end credits were Donald Duck is credited as playing himself.
-Michael J. Ruhland
Resources Used
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/1088/Bachelor-Mother/articles.html
