Tomorrow on TCM is a morning and afternoon of movies with screenplays written by F. Hugh Herbert, not to be confused with character actor Hugh Herbert. However, there's a movie airing on TCM on Saturday, April 5, that I'm planning on doing a blog post about tomorrow, so F. Hugh Herbert gets a mention today. As it turns out, I have one of his movies on my DVR, although it's not one of the movies that TCM is showing tomorrow. That movie is Margie.
The credits are done as something that wasn't uncommon for book adptations, which is the turning of pages with another batch of credits on each page. However, in this set of opening credits the pages are pages of a scrapbook with old photos on the pages accompanying the credits. After the credits, the camera pans into the attic of the house where Margie (Jeanne Crain) lives, together with teenage daughter Joyce (Ann E. Tood, not the same person as Ann Todd despite the middle initial E not being in the opening credits). Joyce finds some of Mom's old stuff from the 1920s when Margie herself was a teenager in the same small Ohio town where they still live, such as a scrapbook, and an old pair of bloomers. Joyce asks Mom to tell her about when she was in high school, so we get the requisite flashback....
The flashback is to 1928, since Herbert Hoover is running for President, although this seems a bit off since the movie was released in November 1946 which means Margie would have had to get married immediately out of high school and been knocked un her wedding night to satisfy the Production Code and have a 16-year-old daughter. Margie is in high school, living with her grandmother (Esther Dale) since Mom is dead and Dad (Hobart Cavanaugh) has to travel a lot for business. Margie has a best friend in Marybelle (Barbara Lawrence) who has a boyfriend Johnnie while Margie doesn't (yet) have one.
That pair of bloomers Joyce found is about to play a part in the plot. The elastic is no longer holding as it used to, and since is the 1920s, it's not as if you can go to your local big-box department store and buy a half dozen pairs of underpants cheaply, which is why the same pair of bloomers keeps falling down and causing all sorts of trouble for poor Margie. She escapes into the library, just as the school's new French teacher, Mr. Fontayne (Glenn Langan) comes in. Margie claims she's doing research for the upcoming debate, but she's as taken with the hot (by the standards of 1940s teens as Hollywood saw them) Fontayne; indeed, all the girls are talking about him.
Margie thinks she's in love with Fontayne, even though he's entirely the wrong age for her. Perhaps one of her fellow classmates would be better, even though she thinks they're all immature. She does have a crush on Marybelle's boyfriend, while pursuing her is nice but inept Roy (Alan Young). Over the course of the movie, Margie prepares for the big debate, on the topic of whether the US should have troops in Nicaragua; goes ice skating with her fellow students; and worries about who's going to take her to the big dance. It all leads up to the reveal at the end of the movie of which of the men she wound up marrying.
I've mentioned in the past that the post-war years at Fox saw a series of nostalgic musicals that were either straight-up biopics, or biopic-like movies. Margie isn't really a musical, although one might be forgiven for thinking you're getting into a musical. Fox probably didn't mind the confusion back in the day since those musicals seemed to be successes and I think audiences of the day liked the nostalgia value of a simpler time. If you're up for nostalgia, Margie certainly fits the bill. However, at the same time I have to say it's dated and definitely not the sort of movie that's going to be for everybody. It's not bad by any means; it's one of those things where I think there are other movies from the era that would be easier for people not necessarily fans of old-time stuff to get into. (For Jeanne Crain, Leave Her to Heaven immediately comes to mind.)