NR | 1h 38m | Drama, Comedy | 1952
The biopic “Room for One More” humorously critiques and celebrates the highs and lows of foster parenthood through the eyes of real-life parents and foster parents Anna Perrott Rose and her husband, based on Rose’s eponymous book.
That Betsy Drake and Cary Grant were a real-life couple during filming reinforced their already enviable onscreen chemistry.
Headstrong Anna (Drake) is a proud mother to three preteen children; her fourth child died. Her indulgent husband George (Grant), or “Poppy,” is a salaried worker. Pining for another child, Anna visits an orphanage. There, she learns that foster parents adopt babies quicker and more regularly than older children. They fear spending time, money, and effort on children brought up elsewhere, whose behavioral baggage may render them rebellious, ungrateful, or bad influences on their own children.
Anna takes that as a challenge. She agrees to foster 13-year-old Jane (Iris Mann) and later 12-year-old Jimmy-John (Clifford Tatum Jr.). Stunned, skeptical, and more than a little slighted, George eventually comes around. Together, they teach their children to adapt to the fun and heartache of growing up alongside foster children. Slowly, Jane and Jimmy-John shed their insecurities and resentment. They adopt the family’s values of sharing and sacrifice, while basking in their generosity and trust. Jimmy-John is set on excelling as a Boy Scout and Jane fancies herself prom queen. This proves tough, with limited resources, to keep adding “water to [the] soup.”
Both Jane and Jimmy-John grew up deprived and abused. Worse, Jimmy-John hobbles around in leg braces, and he can’t even read. It takes all of Anna’s inventiveness and George’s cheerfulness to see them through homework, housekeeping, and hobbies. When Jane or Jimmy-John throw tantrums, George and Anna wonder if they have blundered.
Some gags don’t quite work or are too unrealistic even within an unrealistic plot. Still, the earthy Drake and the talented child actors are perfect as the near-saintly family. Debonair Grant, however, struggles to pass as a homely dad flipping pancakes in the kitchen or playing beach-dad. His comic timing, though, works just enough to distract from this flaw.
Once, George draws a woman’s figure on beach sand, tactfully trying to tell curious Jimmy-John about the birds and the bees. Anna good-naturedly teases, “It’s a very poor likeness.” George, insinuating about the lack of private time with her since having to cope with five rather than three children, deadpans, “I had to draw it from memory.”
Selflessness Its Own Sustenance
Director Norman Taurog’s point? If marriage isn’t for the weak-willed, parenting isn’t either. But he embellishes that with Anna’s corollary: Children—and children alone—give marriage lasting fulfillment. If a husband and wife are the head and heart of the family, a child is its soul. Orphaned children are no less because they’re orphaned; they deserve caring families, too.Taurog isn’t dismissing the fears of prospective foster parents—fixed incomes, inflation, depriving their own children of already limited care and comfort. There must be a line between pure-heartedness and pragmatism; his opening scene features several women playing devil’s advocate. And Anna’s shoehorning of George into becoming a foster parent is unfair. But to Taurog, in the real world, foster parenting is a team effort, whereas love is its own fuel and sustenance.
With no troubles during courtship, a man might not know if he has all it takes to see his woman through sickness and bad times, and a woman might not be able to see her man through a career collapse. Still, they marry. Taurog’s message is that it’s only those who step forward in faith, hope, and love will—seemingly miraculously—find more faith, more hope, and more love. Parents are as clueless about how their own children will turn out as they are about how adopted children will.
Unsurprisingly, the turning point for the initially insolent Jane is when she babysits for the neighbors while she’s still unproven as a responsible child. With Jane’s barely hidden habit of selfish indifference, the panicked neighbors are visibly relieved when they find a sleeping Jane still cradling their sleeping baby.
Taurog is saying that every wholehearted marriage represents a woman and man giving of themselves to each other. Every child, fostered or not, represents a couple’s willingness to give even more of themselves to a child than they’ve given to each other. Who said loving is easy?
