Dear Ruth Graduates to Dear Wife

 

A Paramount Idea of Family Comedy

Push that panic button, here comes another irrepressible 40's teen! Households seemed overrun with them, Edward Arnold often a beleaguered Dad undergoing embarrassment brought on by precocious offspring. He'd spawn Virginia Weidler in The Youngest Profession (1944), Joyce Reynolds in Janie, and later Joan Leslie in the sequel Janie Gets Married, then, and most repeatedly, Mona Freeman for a series of domestic comedies utterly forgotten today, Dear Ruth (1947), Dear Wife (1950), and Dear Brat (1951). Two thirds of the latters are, at least were, accessible on Amazon streaming, Dear Wife and Dear Brat, both owned by Paramount. Dear Ruth went with the 1958 dump of pre-49 Paras to MCA, and has been out of circulation for years.

Joan Caulfield and William Holden were centered in the first two, but did not participate in the third. Edward Arnold and Mary Philips (a former Bogart wife) appeared as parents in all three, Mona Freeman the ongoing cause of misunderstanding and family disaster. She's in fact worse than a "brat"… today you'd be advised to put her on Ritalin and have done with the problem. Holden did these at point of gun that was his Paramount contract, Dear Wife bringing down curtain on his "Smiling Jim" ordeal for the studio, his next a salvation that was Sunset Boulevard. Fun comes of swipes at local politics, obnoxious radio programming, and what'll kids think of next before they took up rock and roll and became a real problem for grown-ups. The Wilkins family isn't rich, but they have a live-in maid, and they always dress for dinner. Pain in the rear that daughter is, she's never insolent or surly with Mom or Dad, movies maintaining as of 1950 that parents and child could reason together. That would end with a thud before long.