Bachelor Mother (RKO, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, July 26) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies from a mini-marathon they were doing of movies about abandoned children raised by others than their biological parents. Among them were the 1920 Charlie Chaplin masterpiece The Kid (alas in what’s become the standard version, severely edited by Chaplin himself in the early 1970’s when he prepared his films for re-release; if you can find a public-domain print of this quite remarkable movie, grab it because Chaplin’s original cut is a deeper, richer work than the chopped and channeled version which has become standard); and Baby Boom, described on Wikipedia as “a 1987 American comedy-drama film directed by Charles Shyer, written by Nancy Meyers and Shyer, and produced by Meyers and Bruce A. Block for United Artists. It stars Diane Keaton as a yuppie who discovers that a long-lost cousin has died, leaving her a 14-month-old baby girl she named as inheritance.” The first of the two we actually watched last night was Bachelor Mother from 1939, made at RKO and directed by Garson Kanin (the evaporation of Kanin’s briefly promising directorial career – it was interrupted by World War II and never resumed because Kanin demanded final cut on any future directorial projects – is one of Hollywood’s minor tragedies) from a script by Norman Krasna based on a story by Felix Jackson. The star is Ginger Rogers, playing a shopgirl named Polly Parrish who’s hired as a seasonal employee by the Merlin and Son department store to handle the Christmas rush. On her way to work one day she passes an orphanage and sees a baby boy left on the doorstep. She picks it up to try to get it in a less exposed position, then knocks on the door of the orphanage and offers them the baby. The people staffing the place immediately assume that Polly is actually the baby’s mother and she’s trying to palm the child off on them. They tell her in no uncertain terms that she should be ashamed of herself for trying to get rid of “her” baby. Her plight attracts the attention of store owner John B. Merlin (Charles Coburn) and his scapegrace son David (David Niven, delivering a droll comic performance that obviously marked him for biggers and betters), whose overall irresponsibility is depicted by him arriving for work at the store at 1 p.m. and telling everybody, “Good morning,” when it’s actually the afternoon. David is depicted as a wastrel with a penchant for drinking, nightclubbing, and womanizing, and dad as an exasperated father who wants his son to shape up and get ready to inherit the store. (One annoyance of this movie is that it’s hard to believe from seeing the two of them together that Charles Coburn could have fathered David Niven, but that’s a common problem with a lot of movies, old and new: we’re asked to believe that two people who look almost nothing alike are biologically related.)

David offers to make Polly a permanent employee as long as she keeps the baby. Fortunately Polly’s landlady, Mrs. Weiss (Ferike Boros), is sympathetic to her plight so at least she doesn’t have to worry about day care (the bane of single motherhood then and now). One of Polly’s co-workers, Freddie Miller (Frank Albertson), offers her a date on Christmas Eve entering a dance contest in which he’s arranged for a guaranteed second-prize victory, which will net them $25 each. (For a movie made when Ginger Rogers’s main career priority was to get herself off the dance floor with Fred Astaire and get the studio and the audience to take her seriously as an actress, this movie sure goes out of its way to show her dancing, both in this opening scene and in a later one in which she and David Merlin are out together and one of David’s friends grabs her and does a dance with her.) On her way to her date at the dance club, the “Pink Slipper” (its exterior seems to be patterned on the real-life Roseland in New York), she drops the baby at the Merlins’ home, and David is shocked by her cavalier attitude and threatens not only to fire her but to blacklist her from work at any other department store if she doesn’t keep the kid. Polly concocts a story about the baby’s father being an abusive ex who once threw a coffee pot at her. Freddie Miller gets a promotion from stock clerk to assistant floorwalker, which he thinks Polly arranged for him through an “in” with David (he actually just got the job through seniority), only he blows it when he identifies David as a shoplifter and has the store’s security people knock him down and threaten to turn him over to the police. The mixup came over a Donald Duck doll, which is depicted as that year’s big Christmas toy item (and which RKO could use because they were Walt Disney’s distributors at the time). There’s a funny scene in which Polly tells David that the store’s so-called “exchange” department never exchanges anything, and David sets out to prove her wrong by disguising himself and exchanging his broken Donald Duck doll for a new one. When he fails, he grabs a doll off the counter, and that’s when Freddie decides he’s a shoplifter and takes aggressive action against him. Pissed off that he’s been demoted to a stock clerk again, Freddie writes an anonymous note to John B. Merlin hinting that his son David is the father of Polly’s baby. David offers to reinstate Freddie as assistant floorwalker if he’ll claim that he is the baby’s dad, while Mrs. Weiss enlists her son Jerome (Leonard Penn) to pose as the father.

The various would-be dads parading through his office just makes John Merlin more convinced than ever that David is the father and therefore the baby is John’s long-awaited grandson. John threatens a legal onslaught against Polly to force her to relinquish custody to him. Meanwhile, New Year’s Eve rolls around and David, stood up for a date, asks Polly to go out with him, and the two end up kissing in Times Square. (Oddly the film does not include the famous ball drop even though Mystery of the Wax Museum, made six years earlier, does. Maybe Kanin, Krasna, and the “suits” at RKO wanted to keep the year all this took place ambiguous.) The film ends with David proposing marriage to Polly and she accepting. Not surprisingly, RKO had a lot of trouble with the Production Code Administration and its chief enforcer, Joseph L. Breen, over this movie. The basic concept of a young single woman stuck with both a baby that isn’t hers and the reputation of being a “bad woman” for having conceived a child out of wedlock seems like an in-your-face defiance of the Production Code, and Breen fought the filmmakers throughout the making of Bachelor Mother. Among the deletions he ordered was the final line Kanin and Krasna wanted Ginger Rogers to say as her character accepted David’s proposal: “Wait till you see the surprise I’ve got for you!” Kanin actually shot the scene with that line intact, maybe hoping he could bully Breen into submission the way David O. Selznick had with the infamous final line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” in Gone with the Wind. But Breen was unmoved and ordered the line deleted for fear it would imply that Polly and David had had premarital sex and she’d got genuinely pregnant by him. Frankly, my dears, I was expecting a plot twist in which the baby actually turned out to be David Merlin’s son and the biological mother one of his former paramours, but there was no way Breen would have let them go there. Even with the Code-mandated deletions, Bachelor Mother is a delightful film, with a finely honed performance by Ginger Rogers and a nicely droll one from David Niven. It’s not one of the classics of screwball comedy (a genre that became popular in the 1930’s because it allowed actors who weren’t generally known as comedians to make people laugh on film), but it is solidly entertaining and smartly directed by Kanin.