If The More the Merrier seems slightly familiar, it was remade twenty years later as Walk, Don't Run, a swansong film for Cary Grant. The Tokyo Olympics housing crunch stood in for the scarcity of rooms in Washington during the war. But George Stevens' picture is superior in all departments, a movie that makes finding even the slightest flaw difficult. Perhaps the reason it's not shown on television much is one topical joke where hero McCrea makes reference to 'Japs' spying in the capitol.

The characters are almost sublime. Pushy but lovable Dingle cheats to become Milligan's tenant and has no qualms about nosing into her affairs, to the extreme of bringing in a second unwanted roommate, the "high-type clean cut nice young fellow" Carter. The two 'boys' are initially a pain but Milligan soon warms up to them, especially Carter, and in no time at all her bigshot bureaucrat fiancée is history. The best thing she can find to say about Pendergast is his impressive yearly salary ($8,600!). When asked for his first name, she replies "Charles J." The script makes all three roommates very nice people but gives them distinctive speech patterns, with Dingle in particular mangling his syntax to amusing effect. As pointed out by Richard Corliss in his book Talking Pictures, Milligan's defection from Pendergast to Carter is cued by the change in her diction, when she drops her fiancée's high tone to converse in the common trenches with her bunk mates.

Stevens started as the main cameraman for Laurel & Hardy short subjects in the twenties, and a big chunk of The More the Merrier makes good use of the same kind of gentle slapstick. The morning routine in Milligan's apartment is disrupted by people getting locked out, coffee pots in the shower and a pair of pants that boomerangs out a window. But all the comedy comes back to character. We delight in seeing the boyish flush on Charles Coburn's face (he won the best supporting actor for the role), hearing Jean Arthur's voice break up into squeaky sobs, or watching Joel McCrea's expression darken as his big date with his landlady is SNAFU'd by a teenage troublemaker from downstairs.

When the movie decides to get sexy, it generates a lot of heat. The script takes advantage of the 8-to-1 ratio of females to each male in D.C. to show a crowd of female office workers harassing a lone man foolish enough to walk by their time clock line. Milligan's single girlfriends buzz like flies around the attractive Carter (one of them is Ann Savage, famous as the femme fatale of Detour). Milligan and Carter sleep on opposite sides of a paper-thin wall, a technically chaste evasion of the production code. The scene is identical to the split-screen effect later 'invented' for Pillow Talk. When their attraction becomes undeniable, there's a great scene on a stoop where Carter keeps touching and reaching for Milligan. She's kept busy countering his moves, but is not exactly resisting either. It's terrific hot-date stuff.

The More the Merrier gives a major boost to the idea of young boys being shipped overseas getting something going with a girl as fast as they possibly can, a sentiment that probably didn't jibe with official policy. When the FBI and the Army get involved in the last plot developments, the writers and Stevens have the nerve to belittle wartime security red tape. Despite all the jingoistic rhetoric, some wartime movies displayed a refreshing independent spirit.

It's hard to believe that Jean Arthur's film career would be over just a few years and four movies later. She's 43 in The More the Merrier but could easily pass for under 30. Stevens coaxed her back for Shane but her last chosen role was in Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair where she played a stuffy and unglamorous congresswoman upstaged by the stylish Marlene Dietrich. Perhaps this is where critics got the idea that Wilder was a brutal lout with his leading ladies. The More the Merrier is her last real romantic lead, and one of her best.

Columbia TriStar's DVD of The More the Merrier looks fine, with only a few seconds where source damage causes the image to become unstable. The sound is good also, but there is a dialogue line or two that are hard to make out. Surprisingly for Columbia, there are no subtitles, not even English ones (but there is closed-captioning). The only extra are the usual vintage trailers for From Here to Eternity and a couple of Fred Astaire musicals.

The packaging lists the film's impressive six Academy nominations, among them Best Picture. It also overstresses the film's "roomers and rumors" theme and uses an irrelevant photo of Arthur posed in a negligée as if she were Rita Hayworth.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The More the Merrier rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Very Good
Sound: Very Good
Supplements: promo trailers
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: November 7, 2004