Based on a series of stories by Sally Benson, this movie covers the trials and tribulations of lawyer Allyn Joslyn's family in Manhattan. It centers itself on Peggy Ann Garner, a dramatic 13-year-old girl whose imagination compares every situation to a vague memory of a movie she has seen, brings forth problems that don't exist, which she attempts to solve..... creating real problems which grow increasingly out of hand as the movie goes on.
It was made into a Broadway show directed by Moss Hart, and the property was bought by Mary Pickford for her own production. Then she sold it to 20th Century-Fox, and it was handed over to their resident G-rated auteur, George Seaton.
There are many things I enjoyed about this movie, particularly the jokes and the peripheral roles, like Miss Garner's friend, Barbara Whiting, whose character rejoices in the name 'Fuffy', one of those thirty-going-on-thirty characters. Yet it was difficult not to compare this to MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS -- same source material author, same adolescent girls-in-crisis model -- and find it curiously lacking. While these days, the essential audience of movie theaters in adolescent and young adults, back then everyone went to the movies, and this was released to the armed forces before the public. Its audience was everyone, fresh from the battlefield or seeking an evening's entertainment free from worries about the war after the newsreels were done. Therefore it has a sort of slick, unsympathetic, mocking view of its juvenile subjects that made it seem mean-spirited, even as I laughed at the gags and the restrained comic reactions of Mr. Joslyn. It's a movie which has not aged well.
