Room for One More (Warner Bros., copyright 1951, released 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, December 22) I watched an unusual film on Turner Classic Movies, part of their days-long marathon programming of Christmas movies and also part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to actor Cary Grant. The film was called Room for One More and was directed by Norman Taurog, who’d “made his bones” in 1931 with Skippy, the film that made child actor Jackie Cooper a major star. So he’d become a go-to guy for films involving kids. Room for One More is more or less based on a true story; the film’s basis is a book by Anna Perrott Rose, which is also the name of the female lead, played by Betsy Blair, Cary Grant’s real-life wife at the time. (Three of Grant’s five wives were actresses – Virginia Cherrill, Betsy Blair and Dyan Cannon – but Blair appears to be the only one he worked with professionally as well.) The script is by two of Bob Hope’s favorite writers, Melville Shavelson and Jack Rose (presumably no relation), which made me wonder if Hope was considered for the male lead before Grant was finally cast. Anna in the movie is the wife of George Rose (Cary Grant), civic engineer for the city of Fairfield, New Jersey (though we only learn the name of the locale from a banner flown during a Boy Scouts ceremony at the very end). He and Anna have had three children of their own, daughter Trot (Gay Gordon) and sons Teenie (George Winslow) and Tim (Malcolm Cassell), but Anna has a penchant for taking in strays of all species. Among the Roses’ brood are a dog who eats anything that falls to their floor and a cat that, unbeknownst to Anna, is not only female but is pregnant and gives birth to five kittens.

Anna visits an orphanage run by Miss Kenyon (Lurene Tuttle), who’s showing off newborn babies (many of them the children of unwed mothers) and getting oohs and aahs from the potential adoptive parents. Miss Kenyon boasts that “our product sells itself,” and then she takes the group to the back of the orphanage, where the older kids are. Miss Kenyon challenges the potential parents there to adopt an older child, but with one exception they couldn’t be less interested in adopting hard-luck kids with physical, mental or emotional disabilities. Anna, of course, is the exception; she picks out Jane Miller (Iris Mann) and brings her home with the intention of fostering her for a year and then finalizing the adoption. Jane is immediately hostile and convinced that this will be just one more home with a couple who will dump her again within a week or two. Despite George Rose’s protests that they’re barely able to support the kids they have financially and one more mouth to feed will push them over the edge money-wise, he yields to his wife. Later on they foster another child, a boy named Jimmy John Wilson (Clifford Tatum, Jr.) who wears braces on both legs – 1952 audiences would have immediately recognized him as a polio victim, and I was wondering, “Where’s Sister Kenny when they need her?,” though later in the movie we see Anna Rose massaging his legs and using Kenny’s treatments to nurse him back to health and full mobility. Jimmy John is also virtually illiterate and says almost nothing until the Roses gradually break him down with their love.

The most vivid parts of the movie to me were the powerful performances of Iris Mann and Clifford Tatum, Jr. as the damaged children the Roses take in and nurse back to both physical and mental health; Iris Mann in particular is vivid in her rendering of Jane’s pain and trauma is indelible and makes me wonder why she didn’t have more of an acting career. Instead, she quit show business and became a journalist. Just what happened to Jane to traumatize her so completely couldn’t be spelled out with the Production Code hamstringing Shavelson and Rose, but it’s not hard for a modern-day audience to figure out she must have been physically abused and probably sexually molested as well. The family goes to a beach resort for the holiday season – remember this was being shown as part of TCM’s Christmas marathon and so there had to be a holiday connection – and Jane attracts the attention of a young man who invites her to the New Year’s prom, only it’s a formal-dress affair and she has nothing to wear. Anna offers to cut down an old dress of hers, but it looks awful on Jane. The Roses ultimately buy Jane a prom dress, but the boy who asked her to the dance withdraws the invitation on orders of his parents and George Rose goes to their home and chews them out for being such snobs. Meanwhile, Jimmy John goes out alone at 5:30 a.m., while it’s still dark and cold (though we have to take that on faith because director Taurog shot the sequence on a studio “exterior” without the telltale breath steaming that people do when they’re really in cold weather, and the scene could have used Frank Capra’s famous icehouse), to complete a 10-mile hike he needs to do to win his coveted Boy Scout merit badge.

My husband Charles came home as the film was wrapping up, when Jane is at the prom and insists on dancing one dance with her dad, and New Year’s happens. The band at the prom marks the New Year by cutting off their surprisingly good swing version of Kay Swift's “Can’t We Be Friends?” to play “Auld Lang Syne,” and Charles couldn’t resist joking that they must have got Guy Lombardo to play their prom. The film ends with the surprisingly elaborate ceremony at which Jimmy John is awarded the coveted Eagle Scout badge, and the ritual provides that his mom has to pin it on him and he gets to pin a separate item on her dress. I wasn’t sure I’d like Room for One More because I was worried it would be too sentimental, but largely due to Cary Grant’s skill as a performer, particularly his dry wit, it avoids descending too far into treacle. Turner Classic Movies recruited Cary Grant’s daughter Jennifer to co-host his movies, and inevitably they asked her whether her own experience being raised by him had any similarities to his acting the role of a father of five in this film. Of course, her domestic situation was quite different because her parents divorced when she was still a child, and she was shuttled back and forth between her mom and her dad, but she still said she recognized some of his gestures as a parent in his performance in the movie, and could also tell the real affection between Cary Grant and Betsy Blair even though their marriage ended in divorce in 1962 and Blair was one Cary Grant wife before Jennifer’s mother (she was number three and Dyan Cannon was number four).