As a romantic comedy, Government Girl has one of those plots where the two leads annoy each other instantly and spend the movie shouting, the better to prove their love, which they don’t figure out until the audience is long past ready to go home. In this corner: Miss de Havilland as an efficient secretary who indulges the kind of slapstick shenanigans she didn’t usually get to deploy. In the other corner: Sonny Tufts as the new loud honcho in charge of building airplanes for the war effort, and who’s ready to cut every corner as he bulldozes through the bureaucracy. Alas, the one looks mainly like de Havilland crawling on the floor and jumping on sofas, and the other looks like Tufts in full bellow.
As a drama with anything resembling a serious point, it’s one of those narratives where the problems are solved by somebody making a Big Speech. This is the era when people really seemed to believe in the Big Speech, especially writers.
In between these two conventional signposts, the story approaches satire of an obvious kind, supported by stereotypes of politics in Washington DC. The characters praise the great job FDR is doing, and some of them even defend the importance of “red tape”, but they fret about machinations to investigate and smear people by Congressional committee. In retrospect, this feels like an interesting prediction. They’re still careful to indicate, however, that the presiding Senator (jovial Harry Davenport) is a fair “two sides to everything” sort of fellow. The bad guys are a profiteering industrialist (whining Paul Stanton), a hoity-toity hostess (snooty Agnes Moorhead), and a careerist attorney (slick and pretty Jess Barker) acting as committee counsel, a partisan outsider who declares that his only goal is to get inside. That’s not intended as a remark on his wooing de Havilland’s character, but the shoe fits.
Much hay is made of the topical idea of Washington’s housing shortage (seen also in the films The More the Merrier and Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), as represented by an annoying subplot in which Anne Shirley and James Dunn play simple-minded newlyweds whose honeymoon is endlessly delayed. At the 11th hour, a spy subplot drops in out of the blue and drops out as quickly. Standing by are Una O’Connor as a nosy landlady, Paul Stewart as the kind of cocky reporter who leans on his elbows and tilts his hat, and Sig Ruman as a blink-and-miss-him ambassador.
Nichols was one of the studio era’s most respected writers, and this is the first and least of three projects he also directed and produced. He scripted the film from Budd Schulberg’s adaptation of a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns, all names that should have promised better material. De Havilland was in the picture after being loaned to RKO from David Selznick, who’d borrowed her from Warner Brothers while she was in the middle of a contract dispute. The property’s come full circle, as it’s now available on demand from Warner Archive.