Twice Blessed (1945)
Identical twins switch places and reunite their parents. No, not The Parent Trap.
There seems to be a good deal of legal precedent, in film at least, for divorcing parents to separate their twins and take one each. This is the premise of, most famously, The Parent Trap (1961) and its 1998 remake, as well other films based on Erich Kästner’s book Das doppelte Lottchen (including the 1950 German film in which Kästner himself serves as narrator).
But this frightfully symmetrical approach to child custody in film predates Kästner’s book, going back at least to The Inn of the Blue Moon. This lost 1918 silent film features Doris Kenyon in the dual role of twin sisters assigned one each to their divorced parents. According to the film synopsis, the sisters are reunited as adults and help bring about the reunion of their parents.
And there is MGM’s B-picture Twice Blessed (1945) which, like the 1950 Das doppelte Lottchen, stars actual twins rather than one actress playing both roles as in The Parent Trap.
Twin actress-singers Lee and Lyn Wilde appeared in a number of movies in the 1940s, married two brothers, and died a year apart in their 90s. In Twice Blessed they play Stephanie and Terry, the teenaged twins of a world-renowned expert in child psychology with political ambitions (Gail Patrick) and a rough-and-tumble newspaperman (Preston Foster). Seven years previously the parents divorced because they “couldn’t agree on how to bring up the kids,” who now meet for the first time in seven years.
Stephanie is being raised by her mother as the perfect product of modern child-rearing expertise. She is world famous for her IQ and impeccable behavior, constantly covered by the press. Yet she is tired of feeling like a laboratory product, always in the spotlight, and forced to live up to her mother’s exacting expectations rather than having fun.
She envies her bobbysoxer sister Terry, brought up by their father with a lighter touch, and who cares far more about jukebox tunes and swing dancing than school subjects. (There is some good jitterbugging in the movie.) Since Terry envies Stephanie her seemingly glamorous international and high society life, the obvious thing is for them to switch places and try each other’s lives on for size.
Cue the comic situations as “Terry” suddenly overwhelms her teachers with her encyclopedic knowledge while “Stephanie” overwhelms the young men at the junior ball with her kissing abilities. The two soon fall in love with each other’s boyfriends, to whom each is much more suited, and each girl defies expectations in a quiz show and on the dance floor, respectively.
And of course they help reunite their parents. Part of the reason for the divorce was not only the disagreement about proper childrearing, but the mother’s insistence on having a career. When the father’s daughter surprises everyone by appearing to win the prestigious knowledge contest, the mother has to admit that her professional expertise has fallen short. Humbled, she is finally willing to curtail her career ambitions and return to her ex-husband.
The father, though, is now being blackmailed by Alice (Gail Hope), his ace reporter at the newspaper and sometime lover. Alice has photos of Stephanie (really Terry) going wild in a jitterbug contest (and subsequent brawl) which she threatens to reveal, thereby blackening the mother’s reputation as a child psychology expert, unless he marries Alice.
To save the day, Stephanie, Terry, and their teenaged friends invade Alice’s apartment, distracting her with all manner of hijinks until they find and recover the incriminating photos. One boy grabs Alice and kisses her, another smashes the windows, and the twins show up in blackface as hotel maids. It’s meant to be comic, but feels brutish. Mission accomplished, the photos are shredded, Alice’s plan is frustrated, and the parents are reunited, the mother’s career to be happily abandoned.
This is clearly a post-World War Two movie about the anxieties and adjustments regarding marriage, career, childrearing, and youth culture at the war’s end. Early on, the mother tells her ex-husband that the war has taught Americans that women don’t need to be housewives. The movie seeks to walk back that notion. The circumstances of the war may have separated spouses and brought women into the workforce but, like the divorce in Twice Blessed, this is to be only a temporary alteration.
Rather than a reset to some notional prewar arrangement, though, the movie is more focused on the young generation and its strange teenage ways: tight sweaters, new dance moves, hep slang. There is a politician in the movie who is running for election on the pressing issue of juvenile delinquency. But juvenile delinquency is what saves the day at the end of the movie when reporter Alice gets mobbed and robbed by the teens.
Watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think of His Girl Friday. In that film, the ace reporter Hildy Johnson wants to give up her job working for her ex-husband’s newspaper, so that she can remarry and settle down as a housewife. Yet at the end the exes are reunited through a shared love of newspaper work.
In Twice Blessed, by contrast, the female ace reporter Alice stays on the newspaper staff only because she hopes that her boss, the twins’ father, will marry her. He instead reunites with his ex-wife, on condition that she give up her career and settle down. Alice is a fallen Hildy, defeated by teenagers in a post-war America that recasts her as the villain.