A Film Canon

The More The Merrier represents an interesting revision of The Talk Of The Town, insofar as it concedes, politically, that cacaphony and democracy can co-exist and, aesthetically, that, taken to a certain pitch, cacaphony can clarify the pleasures of silence, just as overcrowding can clarify the pleasures of privacy, or hyperactivity the pleasures of contemplation. This compromise is presumably a response to America's involvement in WWII, which finds expression primarily in terms of the Washington housing crisis. To this end, Stevens artfully ensures that every space is on a continuum with every other; a world modelled on Russian dolls, in which no room is too small to be further subdivided, nor too large to be further integrated. In the same way, every space is hyperbolically crowded with objects and sensations, as if to bring screwball to its logical conclusion, or co-opt its relatively individualistic ethos into a more nationalistic one. Not only are the streets filled with lovers, and roofs crowded as any beach, but even private property is effectively public, as Constance Milligan (Jean Arthur) discovers after subletting her apartment to a housing contractor (Charles Coburn) who, in turn, sublets his half to a pilot (Joel McCrea), in a kind of wry statement of his urban philosophy, which directly opposes the arcane planning advocated by Constance's (initial) fiancee (Richard Gaines). It's this collapse of public and private that provides the melancholy, subversive subtext, conjuring up a world in which all anyone can really lay claim to is a suitcase, government surveillance is so intense as to warrant the confiscation of a pair of binoculars, and - most delightfully - the main space charted by the Hays Code is meaningless, reduced to a thin blur in the middle of the screen that ensures that Arthur and McCrea effectively inhabit the same double bed.