A Film Canon

 

 

A quietly subversive romantic comedy, The Major And The Minor suggests that even the most upright protagonist is just an astygmatism away from a paedophilic gaze; or, rather, that paedophilia is a mere instance of an exploitative tendency endemic to all romantic exchanges. As harassed, pawed-over scalp massager Susan Applegate, Ginger Rogers flees New York, only to find it necessary to pose as a 12 year-old girl - 'SuSu' - in order to pay the the price of her train, upon which she falls into the protection of Major Philip Kirby (Ray Milland), who offers up his barracks until her parents can come and collect her. There, she encounters a collapse of adult and childhood universes - precocious schoolboys, petulant parents - that explicates her own screen persona as a prickly purveyor of cross- purposes. Most basically, these centre on her disguise - which is widely, if slightly implausibly, accepted - but find more idiosyncratic expression in her ability to talk to the child within adults, and the adult within children, in such a way as to keep the division concealed from everyone but herself and the audience; or, more accurately, to project the unease that her targets are incapable of feeling onto the audience, producing one of the finest filmic marriages of comfort and discomfort, exquisite comedy and exquisite cringe: "It's not often a boy my age gets smiles from someone whizzing by on a kiddy car!"