In the Meantime, Darling

Slender little wartime comedy whose best feature is a winsome young Jeanne Crain and a lively Gale Robbins as new brides. The boys are training in the desert before being shipped overseas. In the meantime, the married officers are boarding at what looks like the only house for miles around. Many of the junior officers are newly married and much of the comedy comes from their efforts to cope. For the girls, it's a period of adjustment sharing facilities and household duties with others. For Crain, with her privileged background, adjustment proves especially difficult.

The premise is promising, but the screenplay remains underdeveloped and never really gels as a comedy. That's not surprising since the running time is 70 minutes for a production probably chunked out in 10 days and scheduled for bottom-of-the-bill showing to the eager droves of wartime audiences. Also, cult director Otto Preminger seems an odd choice for light comedy, his strength being slow, heavy psychological dramas like Laura (1943). The results here suggest he was uninterested in the material, to say the least. Nonetheless, for those interested in how newly-weds adjusted to wartime demands, the movie offers a generally entertaining if lightweight glimpse.