Bachelor Mother

NO SHOW TONIGHT! Sadly we had to postpone tonight’s screening. NEIU has closed their campus due to inclement weather. Stay tuned for updates regarding our New Season!

BACHELOR MOTHER
Directed by Garson Kanin • 1939
While Hays Code enforcement in the late ’30s saw Hollywood studios tamping down any potentially scandalous content in their pictures, the ascendant screwball comedy genre proved one of the safest remaining places for the movies to tackle taboo subject matter. A teary melodrama asking audiences to sympathize with an unwed mother might have been a tough sell to Production Code enforcers, but make it a farce and you have Bachelor Mother, one of RKO’s biggest hits of 1939. Single and facing unemployment at the end of the Christmas season, department store salesgirl Polly Parrish (Ginger Rogers) is more worried about keeping the lights on than she is by any thoughts of her potential future progeny. Nonetheless, maternity is thrust upon her when she’s mistaken for the mother of an infant abandoned outside of an orphanage and word gets back to her soft-hearted boss, David (David Niven). Overnight, Polly’s job becomes a permanent position, with a raise, so long as she takes back the baby which was never actually hers. David, in turn, sees to it that Polly and her child have their every need met. But when David extends an invitation to spend New Year’s Eve with him, Polly begins to suspect his interests may not be strictly humanitarian, and after she accepts, rumors begin to circulate about who could possibly be the father of Polly’s baby. Supported by the considerable chemistry of its leads, Bachelor Mother was a turning point in both of their careers, elevating Niven to marquee status and demonstrating Rogers could be a formidable box office draw outside of her game-changing run of musicals with Fred Astaire. As a class-conscious holiday romance, its earthy charm still comes through as strong as ever, capturing all the melancholy and wonder of the season in one package and putting a bow on it. (CW)
82 min • RKO Radio Pictures • 16mm from Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
Preceded by: Bachelor Father: “Bentley Versus the Girl Scouts” (Jerry Hopper, 1957) – 30 min – 35mm