Mid Week Matinee: The French have a word for it

When I get the flu, I multi-task – watch TV and flip through a mental catalogue of fatal diseases.

Yesterday, battling a near-death experience, one movie drop-kicked me right past the C’s. It’s called The Major and the Minor, filmed sometime in the 1940s, directed and written by Billy Wilder.

You see, Ginger Rogers is fed up with New York and wants to return home to the mid west. But she’s short on train fare. So she dresses up as a 12-year old girl to buy a half-priced ticket. Fast forward through a half dozen improbabilities, and she ends up in the sleeper car of a middle-aged male stranger (Ray Milland). They bunk in separate berths for the night, but he briefly crawls into bed with her during a thunder storm. The next day he tells her to call him Uncle Phillip.

All very innocent(sort of),as Ginger looks like a 35-year old cocktail waitress holding a balloon. Still, don’t expect a Disney remake.

When it comes to weird mid-century sexual implications, I prefer You Never Can Tell. A german shepherd, owned by a young beautiful secretary, is knocked off by a bad guy and returns to earth as a human, a private investigator. Blah, blah, blah, the secretary and the investigator fall in love. The story skirts the issue of, well, you know, by unveiling at the 11th hour the secretary actually comes from a long line of parrots (on her father’s side). So it’s not a dog and woman, it’s a dog and a bird. Or something like that.

Sometimes it’s better not to think too much. I found a clip on youtube. Dick Powell is the reincarnated dog, the assistant a racehorse, and Miss Hathaway his former owner. The movie is no longer available, even on Netflix. I don’t know why; maybe someone thought too much.