A rather gentle wartime comedy set in Washington where a housing shortage sees citizens encouraged to make room to share their accommodations and a male shortage sees eight women to one man all over town.
When he finds his booked hotel reservation unavailable, retired millionaire Charles Coburn's Mr Dingle character decides to make a little mischief by queue-jumping the sublet of an apartment occupied by Jean Arthur's accounts clerkess Connie Milligan and then a little more by subletting his own sublet to Joel McCrae's soon-to-go-overseas soldier, Joe Carter, without asking Connie's permission.
With old Dingle pulling the strings, the already engaged Connie and free and easy Carter are gently drawn together, at the same time disentangling her from her 22 month betrothal to her older, stuffed-shirt fiancé whom she still addresses as "Mr".
Although it has its screwball moments, particularly the extended opening scenes where well-organised Connie lays out a rigorous morning timetable for old Dingle to follow, later complicated when he is joined in the cramped apartment by McCrae, the three's comings and goings are neatly choreographed into a series of slapsticky near-misses until the younger couple finally encounter each other.
Perhaps I prefer my vintage comedies to be just a little bit more madcap than this but for me the film lacked big laugh-out-loud scenes and I wasn't even sure I liked Coburn's interfering old curmudgeon-come-matchmaker character and all that "Damn the torpedoes" stuff. That said, McCrae and Arthur are good, especially in their scenes together, as the film drifts merrily but a little blandly towards its unsurprisingly upbeat but sentimental and somewhat overdone ending.
For me, the movie, while mildly entertaining, lacked the spark and sparkle a Hawks or Capra would have lent to this sort of material and won't stay long in my memory I'm sure.
Review of The More the Merrier
