Posted on 04/25/2026 5:14:02 PM PDT by Twotone
The Baby Boom were mostly still in their cradles or unborn when The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer came out in 1947, which makes the film a historical document – one of our first glimpses of a generation gap forming in postwar America. The whole idea of the teenager is really less than a century old, and by the late '40s it was edging out the "bobby-soxer" – a largely female phenomenon that was launched into public consciousness with the shrieking fans who descended on Frank Sinatra's performances at the Paramount Theater in New York during the war.
In his book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, Jon Savage pins the emergence of the teenager in the public eye with the debut of Seventeen magazine in 1944 – the first magazine to cater to this demographic and specifically its female component, who Savage says "had always been in the forefront of the country's consumer culture."
He writes that "by the early 1940s, American adolescents had succeeded in creating a world quite distinct from both adults and children... Already defined as an ideal and a market, adolescents had begun to publicly assert their independence, a development that had caught government and industry by surprise. At the same time, their upbeat culture was beginning to spread through the youth of war-torn Britain and northern Europe."
The credits of The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer roll over a picture of a big suburban home behind a white picket fence; it's our signal that, while clearly a romantic comedy the film is also a domestic story, concerned with home, family and community. America was desperate to plunge into domesticity after a decade and a half of economic turmoil and war, and Hollywood was nearly delirious with the novelty...
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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Shirley Temple was a achingly beautiful.
The dynamic Grant/Loy chemistry was quickly followed by the
two starring in "Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House" in 1948.
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