The More the Merrier - 1943

Jean Arthur has space to rent at her apartment in wartime Washington DC (she feels it's her patriotic duty) where immense overcrowding is taking place, with lines of potential renters showing up wherever a vacancy sign appears. Charles Coburn has to outfox Arthur in order to get her extra space since she is only willing to rent to a woman, but he pulls it off with only Arthur's character willing to give him a chance but saying she'll probably have to boot him out soon.

Once Coburn has accomplished getting the spare room, out of sympathy for a homeless aeronautical engineer (Joel McCrea) who is sleeping in the park, he then sub-rents part of his small space to him.

The comedy of the tale works in several directions at once, with Coburn playing faery godfather to the incubating romance between his two unwilling cotenants, the dilemma of three adults trying to live together in a small space, and the general trouble of wartime Washington DC, crowded with people and sudden changes due to the federal government management of the war effort. There's also some side-comedy about Coburn losing his trousers, the thinness of the walls between the rooms, and the unsuitability of Jean Arthur's character's fiancee´(Richard Gaines as Charles J. Pendergast) who is hampered by simply not being Joel McCrea.

The More the Merrier is in the vein of screwball comedies of the 1930s (and because of the cast is related somewhat to the earlier Jean Arthur film The Devil and Mrs. Jones) but with a sense of reality seeping in around the edges because of the war. Arthur and Coburn are a well-oiled comedy team, and the slightly sarcastic McCrea fits right in as the third wheel.

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Original Page September 23, 2025