Margie (1946)

HUGE spoilers below; if you mind it, go away.

Second viewing; first: September 23, 1990.

The life of an adolescent girl living in a small town in 1928 America. She has a crush on her French teacher and her "bloomers" keep falling.

Very funny, and occasionally lyrical, chronicle of adolescence. Reviewer Andrew Prasagam provides the names of the three short stories on which it was based in his excellent review. The author is My Sister Eileen's sister, whose husband gets credit in the movie as well. Screenwriting was assigned to a then-famous playwright who, in the Internet Movie Database staff's words, was "best known as the creator of the archetypal American teen, Corliss Archer, introduced in his 1943 Broadway play Kiss and Tell" (this probably qualified him for this job better than anyone else). The movie's central motif of underwear trouble is obviously charged with psychoanalytic symbolism. Critic Dale Thomajan, in a very good review named "The Best High School Movie", printed in Film Comment in July 1992 (and excerpted from his book "From Cyd Charisse to Psycho"), which I accessed at a University computer (from a database named ProQuest, it seems), after describing how Margie's teacher retrieves and later returns Margie's fallen underwear, observes: "This, by the way, is all more innocent than it sounds, though perhaps less innocent than it was intended to be." He is right, of course, and I would add that this sentence is perfect to define the film as a whole. The central theme of the movie is the concept of "father figure". Here we have a girl who does not have a mother (and not once seems to miss one), and whose father is not much of a father figure (although she of course craves for as much of him as she can get). Her grandmother, who raised Margie practically on her own, is as masculine a figure as one can expect from a woman; she is, in the words of a character, "outspoken", was a suffragette, and wants Margie to be president of the U.S.A. So Margie is stuck with a feminine man and a masculine woman, neither of whom can provide her with the father figure she needs. Enter her French teacher. Of course, the script makes it clear he is "only a few years older than her", but there is no mistake about his fatherly attitude towards her. The eventual outcome is only logical. I think that if this film seems mildly disturbing today it is because it is hard for us living in our present-day society to believe that once there was one in which the level of trust was so high. This trust had solid foundations which made sure that things would never go outside acceptable standards of behavior. And in 1946, it is plausible that things seemed pretty unchanged in that regard, and yet they were on the brink of falling apart. Of course, in other respects, 1928 was also on the brink of falling apart, as the film ironically implies by making one of the debaters reference American prosperity in an all too confident tone. The film has numerous anthological one-liners, some of which Mr. Thomajan cites in his review. He refrains from printing his favorite one, out of consideration for future viewers. Having forewarned readers on top of this post, I will have no such qualms. Here's Mr. Thomajan favorite spoken line (preceded by some earlier ones on which it depends for context):

(Margie dances with her French teacher)
Girl: Look, Marybelle. Margie is doing all right!
Marybelle: Oh, he's just taking pity on her.
Girl: Wish he'd take pity on me.
(Johnny takes Margie from her French teacher, and starts dancing with her)
Girl (to Marybelle): Isn't that nice? Now Johnny is taking pity on her too.

Mr. Thomajan also expresses his puzzlement at this film's "relative lack of reputation". I think all films dealing with adolescence are viewed as minor. The reasons are not that hard to fathom, though.

Rating: 76 (up from 69)