Three of Jean Arthur s Columbia comedies | San Diego Reader sandiegoreader.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sandiegoreader.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
I grew up on a steady stream of ’80s and ’90s comedies about how hilarious it would be if men had to parent their own kids. So you can imagine my surprise when I flipped on TCM a few years ago and discovered a romantic comedy from the 1940s that featured its dreamy male lead bathing a baby with the confidence of a well-practiced babysitter. There’s humor at play he’s taking over for a woman who’s merely pretending to be a mother and the whole sequence has the high stakes of a false-identity farce. But the laughs come from the goofy situation, rather than at the expense of either of the characters. Instead, his natural nurturing abilities are part of his romantic appeal and her complete incompetence is part of her quirky charm. It’s a subtly progressive scenario that honestly wouldn’t feel out of place in a contemporary rom-com.