Room for One More (1952)
Room for One More (1952)
Directed by Norman Taurog
We’ve been talking about gladness here at Word and Song, so I’m going to recommend a movie that will surely make you glad, if you have a heart for children and family life, you’re not looking for some Message, and you can see the comedy and, sometimes, the close call with tragedy that our lives together involve. This one’s based on a real American family, from the autobiographical book by the matriarch, Anna Perrott Rose: Room for One More. Mrs. Rose and her husband George were not rich. They had several children of their own, and then they became foster parents for several more, and that’s the setup for the film.
Anne Rose (Betsy Drake, with her pleasant hint of a southern accent) and “Poppy” (Cary Grant, and nobody else but Jimmy Stewart could have been fit for the role) have three children already, but one day, at a big meeting of her women’s club, Anne hears a woman speak about how many children languish under government care, when they really need to be around people outside of an institution. So she is moved to welcome, for a two-week vacation from the foster home, a deeply troubled teenage girl named Jane, who has attempted to take her own life. The vacation is a kind of trial – will they take Jane into their lives for good, adopting her into the family? Love, not pity, must win the day, and it’s not always clear that it will. Poppy won’t let the girl harm his family, and all the children must agree. Meanwhile, the people at the foster home have a crippled boy named Jimmy-John – he must walk haltingly, with leg braces. He is angry and unruly, and they don’t know what to do with him. He’s the one for whom the movie is named. Will the Rose family have room for one more?
Don’t think that this is a sentimental film. The foster children have been badly used. Jimmy-John is twelve and can’t read. He hates the Roses at first, smashing a bicycle, and carrying out his threat to leave them without a single thing they’ve given them. That would include the clothes on his back.
“He’s stitch-stark naked!” cries Teenie, whose bike Jimmy-John smashed.
The movie, by the way, is worth watching just for George Winslow, nicknamed “Froggie” for the remarkable bass voice he had already when he was a little kid. You may remember him as the boy playing Indians with his fellows in Monkey Business, demanding that Cary Grant do the Indian raid in the right way. “You gotta have a war dance first,” he growls.
The Rose family doesn’t just exist in its private sphere, though. There’s school, neighborhood, town, and all the social business that Americans once took for granted. Jane has a crush on a boy who invites her to the prom, but his mother refuses to let him go – mothers, as usual, being the hardest on girls of dubious parentage. Jimmy-John wants to become an Eagle scout, but that means learning to read, and embarking, in the middle of winter, on a long hike by himself, braces and all. One more child and still one more child mean sacrifices for everybody, as is clear when they open their Christmas presents.
You couldn’t make the film now. Jane now would be sexually active, and Jimmy-John would have seen and perhaps engaged in more evil than Mrs. Rose could have imagined. Of course, it would have to have a political angle, and the enemies would be religious prudes; the cliches write themselves. Beyond that, though, you’d need innocence, because as bad as Jane and Jimmy-John can be, they’re not wicked, and most of the people around the Rose family have good hearts. And you’d need a warm and grateful appreciation of the gifts of each sex for the other, as there’s nothing like what Poppy does for Jane at the prom, and nothing like the moment when Jimmy-John gives a public tribute to his best girl, his mother.
Add to this a sharp dialogue with a lot of jokes and nothing snide, and the teasing banter between the often exhausted Poppy and Anne, and you have a deeply satisfying film which, without anyone’s intending it, offers a glimpse into an American world that was. Guidance, I’d say, in building up a human culture again.
Betsy Drake and Cary Grant were married to each other. The marriage unraveled in 1956 when Grant became entranced with Sophia Loren while they were making a film in Europe. Betsy Drake was there and saw the writing on the wall. She left for the United States on the ocean liner ANDREA DORIA on its last, disastrous voyage. She survived—there is a photo of her on the rescue ship, neatly dressed but shoeless and wearing men’s crew socks. A friend who met her at the Chelsea Dock said she appeared calm but wasn’t really handling the experience well. She eventually left acting to study and then practice psychology.
I could relate to so much of it. A bunch of kids squished in a car without seatbelts, riding double on bikes without helmets. Youngest bringing hot coffee to his dad, babysitting without experience ,the simplicity of Christmas, kids who listened to their parents and helped raise each other. Lovely movie.