Our of our more loyal members, Laurel, took time to post on Facebook this morning that she was “[w]atching Ginny on TCM in THE AFFAIRS OF MARTHA. Love this movie.”

I do, too. I know that it’s not the best film they cast her in-my Xfinity guide called it droll-and I also know that there has been criticism in some reviews that they role was meant to be played by an actress much younger. (Joan Carroll, maybe, or Juanita Quigley?) Virginia was fifteen when she went into the braided brat costume for the last time.

The truth, though, is that the screenplay was written by Isobel Lennart with Lee Gold. Since Lennart was a staff writer, not someone bringing in her work from the outside, I have no doubt that the role was written for Ginny as staff writers at MGM were generally doing at that time when writing programmer comedies. I don’t know if it was a formal edict from above, or if the writers just thought they had a better chance of getting their work selected if a Dinah Lord type was found in the pages, but it did seem to occur. In an odd twist two of her best roles at MGM weren’t written for her at all, Dinah, of course, and Ginny Johansen of BARNACLE BILL, who was originally written for TOWSNBN.

I’ve written four paragraphs and haven’t yet said why I like the film. I like the film because I like Miranda Sommerfield. She’s the only one of the braided brats who really knows she’s a troublemaker and is actively trying to be one. Dinah hints at that a bit, but Miranda comes straight at you.

Trying to convince her brother Jeff (Richard Carlson) to break up with his fiancee Sylvia (played unsympathetically snobbish and manipulative by Frances Drake in her final film), Miranda rouses him with a speech that gives us Miranda’s problem child background.

“It wouldn’t be so tough. Remember the time I broke the lease in New York? Remember the time I got that governess to quit? Remember…remember VALLEY FORGE!” OK, it looks silly in print, but when you hear her say it, you actually get a pretty good idea that this is a girl who has pretty much controlled the course of her family’s life from her very start-with the passive older brother Jeff and two befuddled and detached parents (Spring Byington and Melville Cooper) that wasn’t a tough task-and is frustrated that she can’t get Jeff to cast out the interloper threatening her reign.

She also has a well played exchange with Allan Joslyn after he crashes the engagement party as she tries to find out who he really is.

The film wasn’t an award winner, but is an enjoyable comedy made better because Lennart and Gold got how to write Virginia.