Those Darn Torpedoes!

Another movie we got from the Movies Unlimited sale was The More the Merrier (1943). Ms Spenser and I have a history with this movie. We saw it long before we started dating, at a college Film Society showing. I loved it, but she had hoped for a happy ending - where she kicks the jerk to the curb instead of marrying him.

It is set at the height of the wartime housing crisis in Washington DC. Charles Coburn is visiting to work on this crisis, and finds he can't get a hotel room. Walking through DC. looking for housing, he passes the statue of Admiral Farragut, and remembers his classic line "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" He finds that Jean Arthur is renting half of her aparrtment and bulls his way in.

There's a bit of comedy involving Artur's attempts to set up a carefully timed routine for morning baths and breakfast. But Coburn, being a busybody, wants to know why she doesn't marry a high-minded, clean-cut young man. They are in short supply in DC, what with the war, but "Damn the torpedoes".

When Arthur is out, Joel McRea comes looking for a room, and Coburn sublets half of his half to him. When Arthur discovers that she is rooming with a young man as well as an older one, she is not happy. But since McCrea is shipping out in a week, Coburn convinces her to let him stay. 

I'll leave out a lot of foolishness, and skip to the last act. Arthur has been long engaged to a boring, snooty bureaucrat, and he finds out about her roommate. Coburn convinces McCrea and Arthur that they must get married for the sake of propriety, then when he ships out in two days, they can get it annulled. He hustles them down to So. Carolina, where there's no wait for the papers. On the way back, Arthur can't stop crying. In the airport diner, soda jerk Grady Sutton (Ogg Oglivey in The Bank Dick) sighs, "Newly weds".

I don't have to tell you how the plan to wed in name only and then anull goes.

So, on our first viewing these many years ago, Ms. Spenser explained to me that she likes screwball, but doesn't consider a lovely woman like Jean Arthur marrying Joel McCrea to be a happy ending. He acted like a jerk to her the whole time, and she had to be bullied into marrying him by Coburn. She would have preferred her to dump her drippy fiance and tell McCrea to look her up when the war is over. Well, I held that it was a convention - comedies end in marriage, tragedies in funerals. But I secretly thought it was romantic. I still do, but I see her point of view. But also, I think she finds it romantic now, too. 

And of course, we both love Jean Arthur. I feel that her strength as an actress is conveying intelligence. Her fault here is overthinking, and not allowing her heart to override her brain. 

Ed. Note: This was remade as Walk, Don't Run, set at the Tokyo Olympics, and Coburn got to re-use his slogan in another movie. 

Further Ed. Note: For a shorter version of this story, see A30 in this film quiz.