THE MAJOR AND THE MINOR (1942) - airing June 3


If you're like me, when you consider the movies directed by Billy Wilder, the dramas come to mind first--Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17, Sunset Boulevard, The Lost Weekend, Five Graves to Cairo and Double Indemnity--before the comedies like Some Like it Hot and The Seven Year Itch or the hybrids like The Apartment (in a related note, Billy Wilder...wow!)

Yet, the story behind the comedy that marked Wilder's Hollywood directorial debut is worth telling--and the movie worth seeing. In the late '30s and early '40s, Wilder and Charles Brackett, were a successful team: their writing credits included Ninotchka and Hold Back the Dawn. But Wilder, like so many others, hated seeing other directors mishandle his scripts. I'm being kind. Wilder likely didn't use the word "mishandle." Odds are he said something like "butcher."

However he phrased it, Wilder convinced Paramount to let him direct the next Wilder-Brackett script, which became The Major and the Minor. Ginger Rogers plays a Midwesterner so fed up with New York, she plans to take the train back home to Iowa, only it turns out she lacks the proper fare. Naturally, she pretends to be an 11-year-old girl to snag the half-price rate for kids under twelve. So you have Ginger Rogers, 31 at the time, playing a woman pretending to be eleven. And as you'll see, she easily passes for 28.

Rogers was close to being the hottest actress in Hollywood in 1941, fresh off a Best Actress Oscar® for Kitty Foyle. So how did a first time director nab such a coveted star? He knew his way around a menu. Rogers liked the script and agreed to meet Wilder for dinner. "He had the qualities to become a good director," said Rogers. "He knew just how to order in the restaurant, but remembered to ask me what I liked...He certainly understood how to pay attention to women."

Wilder roped in Ray Milland, the Major in the title, with less fanfare. Wilder pulled up next to Milland at a stop light as both men were leaving the studio. Wilder yelled over their running motors, "Would you like to be in a picture I'm going to direct?" Milland, thinking Wilder was kidding-- he was just a writer, after all--replied, "Sure!"

Like Rogers, Milland was taken with the script, despite its absurdities. But in explaining those moments of suspended disbelief, Wilder reminds us of one reason we love the era of classic Hollywood. We lacked today's cynicism. Wilder later admitted that "now it seems a little foolish" to have Rogers imitate an 11-year-old. But, he added, "audiences were very generous in those days." It was a lesson in generosity Wilder revisited 17 years later when he dressed Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in dresses and everyone just accepted that they looked like women.

by Ben Mankiewicz