104 min
6.8
1943
USA
It's World War II and there is a severe housing shortage everywhere - especially in Washington, D.C. where Connie Milligan rents an apartment. Believing it to be her patriotic duty, Connie offers to sublet half of her apartment, fully expecting a suitable female tenent. What she gets instead is mischievous, middle-aged Benjamin Dingle. Dingle talks her into subletting to him and then promptly sublets half of his half to young, irreverent Joe Carter - creating a situation tailor-made for comedy and romance.
Overview
Reviews
CinemaSerf wrote:I’d have liked a bit more from Charles Coburn in this, but he still features engagingly enough as the man who facilitates the meeting of his unexpectedly acquired landlady “Connie” (Jean Arthur) to the man he has sub-let one half of his bedroom too. That man is “Joe” (Joel McCrea) and his arrival comes after a little failed cloak and dagger activity from “Dingle” who was only staying for a few days himself, and who had no authority whatsoever to take the man’s six bucks to sleep in her apartment. Scene set, what now ensues is hardly rocket science, but Arthur is on good form as the inevitable courtship plays out despite her already being engaged to the steady “Pendergast” (Richard Gaines) and there being a secret sub-plot that could end up embroiling them in affairs of the dreaded FBI! There is chemistry a-plenty between Arthur and McCrea, loads of mischief and some great timing from a Coburn whose matchmaking could have got him a job on “Fiddler on the (sun) Roof”. There is also plenty of quickly-paced dialogue that builds nicely on the accumulating daftness of the whole thing as people from adjacent bedrooms chat to each other through their respective open windows. It’s got a small cast, so we can focus on the characters better and with a jolly accompaniment from studio regular Leigh Hardine it lets Coburn, Arthur and McCrae entertain us for one hundred, enjoyable, minutes.
