Word: mccrea
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...More the Merrier (Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn, Joel McCrea; TIME...
...More the Merrier (Columbia) is a smart, civilized comedy about wartime Washington's nationally famous housing shortage. It does credit to Director George Stevens (now an Army major) as his last civilian job. It is also a credit to its principals-Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and especially stoop-shouldered veteran Charles Coburn...
...imperially rents half of a three-room apartment from its attractive occupant. Jean Arthur. He obviously considers himself old enough to be her mother, and thus overrides her misgivings. Behind her back, he then proceeds to sub-sublet half of his half to a clean young stranger, Joel McCrea. When Jean's stuffy Government boss takes her out to dinner, Coburn & McCrea sardine themselves into a dismal nightclub only to find that it is the scene of their landlady's tedious date. Coburn draws off the Government bore while McCrea gets to work with the romance...
...Dingle's inordinately long nose perceives that his landlady is far from satisfied with her fiance, Charles J. Pender-gast (Bruce Bennett), an effectively sickly-looking Washington bureaucrat. So Dingle sub-lets his half of the apartment to a "fine, clean-cut, high-living young man," Joe Carter (Joel McCrea). By the Hollywood law of mutual gravitation, the two are drawn together and the result is the usual ending, although a little more drawn out than is usual...
Jean Arthur, at 37, still is unexcelled at the art of portraying pretty young things; none of Hollywood's starlets can come within a whoop and a holler of her perfection. McCrea, whose "hand-somest pair of masculine legs" are revealed in all their pristine splendor for feminine onlookers, is strong and silent surpassingly. Bennett is good--surprisingly good in a thankless role. But the honors must go to Charles Coburn, whose portraiture of an elderly busybody is convulsingly funny while it ties the picture together. The scene in which McCrea gets his arms around Miss Arthur after five minutes...