General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer

The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer is a 1947 American romantic comedy directed by Irving Reis, written by Sidney Sheldon, and starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Shirley Temple, in which a teenage girl's crush on a playboy artist forces her older sister, a judge, to sentence the artist to date the girl until the infatuation fades.¹^•² RKO Radio Pictures released it wide on September 1, 1947, after a New York opening on July 24.¹ Sheldon's screenplay won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York premiere July 24, 1947; wide release September 1, 1947, by RKO Radio Pictures¹
Principal cast	Cary Grant (Richard "Dick" Nugent), Myrna Loy (Judge Margaret Turner), Shirley Temple (Susan Turner), Rudy Vallee (Tommy Chamberlain)⁴
Running time / format	93 or 95 minutes; black and white, RCA Sound System, 8,537 feet¹
Production	A Dore Schary production; shot mid-July to mid-October 1946; personnel borrowed from David O. Selznick's Vanguard Pictures¹
Award	Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Sidney Sheldon³
Box office	Modern sources give $5,550,000; the-numbers.com lists $8,750,000 domestic³^•⁵
Afterlife	Grant and Loy re-teamed in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948); Grant and Temple reprized the story on Lux Radio Theatre, June 13, 1949⁴

Spoilers

Plot

Judge Margaret Turner (Myrna Loy), a single judge who is guardian of her teenage sister Susan (Shirley Temple), hears a case involving Dickie Nugent (Cary Grant), a playboy artist charged with three acquaintances after a brawl in a Los Angeles nightclub, and dismisses the defendants with a warning.¹ Later that day Nugent lectures on art at a local high school, where Susan becomes infatuated with him after imagining him as a knight in shining armor; she interviews him for the school paper, and he invents a lurid past for himself and offhandedly agrees to use her as a model for one of his "Americana" paintings.¹

Susan sneaks into Nugent's empty apartment and is found there by her sister, which lands Nugent in jail and widens the split between the sisters.¹^•⁶ The remedy comes from Matthew Beemish (Ray Collins), the sisters' uncle and a psychiatrist: Margaret offers Nugent his choice of jail or dating Susan until the crush abates, and he chooses Susan.⁶ As Susan pretends to be more sophisticated than her age and Nugent tries to behave like a hip teenager, Margaret realizes that she herself has fallen for him.²

Production

The film began as a project called Suddenly It's Spring, developed in late 1946 when David O. Selznick's Vanguard Films worked with RKO to team Shirley Temple with Cary Grant.³^•⁷ In addition to Temple, RKO borrowed actor Johnny Sands, producer Dore Schary, and writer Sidney Sheldon from Selznick's company; the film was Schary's last personal producing assignment before he became vice-president in charge of production at RKO.³ Sheldon's screen story had also circulated under the title "Too Good to Be True."

The title itself was contested. Schary objected to The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer because he felt it suggested a distasteful sexual relationship, but the more commercially minded Selznick overruled him.³ A "bobby-soxer" was then the term for a teenage girl wearing socks with the tops turned down.⁸

Filming ran from mid-July to mid-October 1946, and it was an unhappy shoot. Director Irving Reis collapsed a week after filming started and was replaced temporarily by Schary; when Reis returned, he concentrated on technical matters while Schary handled the actors.³ Grant publicly disapproved of Reis, whom he considered to lack comedy credentials, and complained that Reis favored Loy by allowing her "...to get away with murder"; at one point Reis walked off the picture.⁴ Grant had accepted the role to work off his old RKO contract, and off the set he was troubled by an FBI investigation involving his friend Howard Hughes, who nearly died a week before filming in the crash of his XF-11 prototype, and by the death of his business partner Frank Vincent from a heart attack.⁴

One scene was changed under outside pressure. According to a pre-release article, a representative of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Chicago, reading that Temple was to take her first screen drink in the film, asked RKO to eliminate the scene; in the released film Temple takes no alcoholic drink.³ Exterior shots of Beverly Hills High School appear in the picture, and art director Carroll Clark scouted locations at Lake Arrowhead, California, though it is not known whether any scenes were shot there.³

Reception and box office

The film opened to favorable reviews, and the TCM account describes ticket sales of "an almost unprecedented 5.5 million dollars," enough, it says, to carry RKO over into 1948.⁴ Reported totals differ across sources: the American Film Institute's modern sources give $5,550,000,³ the-numbers.com lists $8,750,000 in domestic box office,⁵ and one retrospective fan site gives $10,500,000.⁷

At the 20th Academy Awards, honoring films of 1947, Sheldon won Best Original Screenplay, a result the TCM account calls a surprise: RKO had expected its Goldwyn co-produced The Bishop's Wife to win the category, and Ed Sullivan had predicted Grant for Best Actor; neither was even nominated.⁴ The film benefited from an "enormously successful post Oscar re-issue" as audiences lined up to see it again.⁴

Legacy

The on-screen chemistry between Grant and Loy, despite the troubled production, led RKO to re-team them immediately in the profitable Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948).⁴ When Grant received his honorary Oscar in 1969, he thanked Sheldon among the select people he acknowledged.⁴ For Sheldon, then at the start of a career that later produced bestselling novels and the television series I Dream of Jeannie, the Oscar was the culminating success of his early Hollywood screenwriting years.⁹ Grant and Temple reprized their roles in a Lux Radio Theatre broadcast of the story on June 13, 1949, with Sands also repeating his part.³ The story was later adapted for the stage by F. Andrew Leslie and is licensed by Dramatists Play Service as a full-length comedy for a cast of 9 women and 16 men.⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026