I'll tell you why so serious

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Rebellious 17 year old bobby-soxer Susan Turner (Shirley Temple) lives with her guardian sister Judge Margaret (Myrna Loy). DA Tommy Chamberlain (Rudy Vallee) would like to be more than an officer of the court. Richard Nugent (Cary Grant) is a defendant in Margaret's courtroom after two women fought over him in a nightclub. He's late to court and she's not impressed. She releases him and he goes to Susan's school where he is the painter guest lecturer. Susan idolizes him as a knight in shining armor. High school boy Jerry White (Johnny Sands) just doesn't measure up. She talks her way into his apartment. He's shock to find her. Tommy and Margaret get there right at the wrong time. Richard punches Tommy and is put in jail. Uncle Matt Beemish (Ray Collins) is the court psychiatrist and recommends Susan be allowed to date Richard until the infatuation wears out. Margaret is willing to drop the charges as long as Richard goes out with Susan.Cary Grant is terrific as ever. Shirley Temple's aggressive acting style which worked so well as a child is somewhat offputting as a teen. Her comedic style just doesn't work quite as well. Myrna Loy is too cold and doesn't develop any heat in the relationship. She has her mean face on for too long and the change is too abrupt. The comedy is pretty oddball and jailbait story is awkward at times. The saving grace is the charms of Cary Grant. He makes this work somewhat.

A dashing artist (Cary Grant) makes a bad impression on judge Myrna Loy. Her younger sister (Shirley Temple) encounters him at her school, and gets a school-girl crush on him that causes him nothing but headaches. When Loy misunderstands a situation where Temple ends up in Grant's apartment, she must eat crow by asking him to pretend to date Temple in order to have her sister get over him. But with all of Grant's efforts, Shirley just won't change her mind about him. Loy's associate and boyfriend Rudy Vallee is upset to discover that Loy and Grant have gone out on a date together, and confronts them at a restaurant, along with Temple and her own on-and-off boyfriend, Johnny Sands. Behind the scenes, Loy's psychiatrist uncle Ray Collins puts two and two together, and realizes that Grant and Loy are attracted to each other. Secretly, he must despise Vallee; Who wouldn't? That character is more square than the one at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue.The whole premise made me uncomfortable once I realized that Loy was pushing Grant and Temple together in order to get Temple to forget about him. Grant is said to be 18 years older in this film than the 17 year old Temple; The truth is that he was 24 years older. Older men and younger women were OK in old Hollywood; look at "Girl's Dormitory" and "Daddy Long Legs" for example. It's believable for a teenage girl to have a crush on an older man, but not to push it so hard as to taking him to a Basketball game. That Sands would loose concentration on the basketball court watching her doesn't seem believable, either. I know how important High School sports are to young athletes, and he wouldn't miss such an easy shot or not pay attention as the star center. The truth was it was a bit gross to see Temple and Grant together.Still, I did find most of the film enjoyable; I wanted to see more of Myrna Loy together with Grant, and less of Temple. Fortunately, she gave a better performance here than in other films of the mid 40's she did; She was certainly a lot less cloying and not as pouty as normal. That gets old really fast and was one of the weaker points of "Since You Went Away", an otherwise excellent film. There's an amusing birthday song bit in the restaurant scene, and the chess game between Ray Collins and Great Uncle Harry Davenport is funny too. Sadly, I found the ending to be really way too "cute" and unsatisfying. The fact that this won Best Screenplay at the Oscars (for Sidney Sheldon) was quite a questionable choice.

"The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" is one of my favorite romance comedies starring Cary Grant as professional painter Richard Nugent (the bachelor), Myrna Loy as Judge Margaret Turner, and Shirley Temple as Margaret's much younger sister Susan (the bobby-soxer), for whom Margaret is legally responsible. One day Richard is brought to Margaret's court on a public disturbance charge that is soon dropped, and later that day he gives a lecture on art at the high school where Susan attends. The seventeen-year-old Susan instantly falls in love with this much older man and shows up uninvited at his apartment in order to pose for him, resulting in Richard innocently being hauled off to jail before he can even say a word. Things look bad for Richard until Margaret's & Susan's uncle Dr. Matt Beemish (Ray Collins), the court psychiatrist, comes up with a plan: Richard is to be (reluctantly) Susan's beau until she gets over her crush for him.My favorite scenes from "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" include the following (DO NOT read any further until after you have seen this picture). On the evening that Susan sneaks into Richard's apartment hoping to pose for him, Richard turns on his radio and hears a nice orchestration of "My Shining Hour," after which he is horrified to see Susan lying on his couch; he then hears loud bangings on his door as the next song announced on the radio is "Last Ride in a Patrol Wagon"! While sitting in jail, Richard offers a hilarious explanation (which escalates in confused anger) to his attorney (Dan Tobin). In order to win the disapproval of Margaret's & Susan's cranky great-uncle Judge Thaddeus Turner (Harry Davenport), Richard shows up at the Turner household hastily dressed like a zoot, playfully adopting the slick jive talk and fancy footwork as only Cary Grant could do so well. Later on at the picnic, Richard and assistant district attorney Tommy Chamberlain (Rudy Vallee), with whom Richard had an altercation during his aforementioned arrest, spend a very silly afternoon competing in the picnic races; Richard fails miserably until the final full-fledged obstacle course, in which Susan's spurned boyfriend Jerry (Johnny Sands) fixes it so that Richard wins. Richard and Margaret hope to spend a quiet evening together at a nightclub, but they are soon unexpectedly joined, one by one, by Susan, Jerry, Tommy, and a young couple (Don Beddoe and Vera Ann Borg) with whom Richard had the altercation that brought him to Margaret's court in the first place; without having done anything wrong, Richard becomes insulted, yelled at, splashed in the face with wine, and stuck with the check while everyone else angrily leaves Richard's table, including Margaret. And finally, back at the Turner residence, the slamming of various doors infuriates Thaddeus until he himself behaves immaturely."The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer" is a wonderful comedy with an excellent cast. Nobody but Cary Grant could play the role of Richard Nugent, a man who tries his best to be respectable and elegant but who innocently gets caught up in extraordinary situations. Myrna Loy was perfect as the stern yet likable Judge Margaret Turner, who is very loving & protective of her younger sister and who eventually sees just what a charming man Richard is. And Shirley Temple, with whom we are more familiar as a child star, turned out to be a very beautiful adolescent and was perfect for the role of the adorable, intelligent, lovesick Susan Turner.

I wasn't expecting to much from this movie but was pleasantly surprised. Though the plot is a quite far fetched I couldn't help but fall in love with this fairy tale. So often with modern Hollywood comedies the laughs are from base and uninteresting humour. Not so here. The jokes are well thought out and do not challenge ones intelligence. I'm not a prude and the humour here is not prudish. Sometimes very subtle....as when Grant admires Loy's breasts at their meeting in an upscale restaurant. A prime example of a 1940s screen writer slipping one past the Hollywood censors. This movie has no dead spots...no lulls and entertains from beginning to end.