The Major and the Minor

A woman (Ginger Rogers) posing as a twelve-year-old in order to ride half-fare on a train back home, finds herself traveling with an Army Major (Ray Milland) who’s unaware of her real age.

The Major and the Minor marked Billy Wilder’s debut as a Hollywood director. Working from a script he co-wrote with Charles Brackett, Wilder eschews much of the edgier material his later film would touch on, and instead plays it safe delivering a nice, easy romantic comedy that falls somewhere between okay and good.

The biggest challenge is swallowing a thirty-one-year-old Ginger Rogers passing for a twelve-year-old girl. She doesn’t look like a little girl; she looks like exactly what she is: a grown woman in girl’s clothes. It’s a frustrating gimmick that only really works once an actual kid (played perfectly by Diana Lynn) sees through it. Then the film kicks into gear with Rogers fighting off the overly amorous advances of twelve-year-old boys while simultaneously trying to woo Ray Milland without arousing the suspicions of his catty fiancé.

While The Major and the Minor never really fires on all cylinders, it’s not unpleasant either, especially once you get past the first quarter. Had Wilder made this film later in his career, he likely would have given it a lot more edge, exploiting the old-man young-girl gimmick in all kinds of devilish angles, but, as is, it’s still an easy ride with a few chuckles along the way.