Okay, this one is probably going to be a stretch. The movie was black & white, from (I’m guessing) the 1940s, screwball comedy genre. The few scenes I definitely remember go like this -
A waiting room just outside a hospital delivery room. Two concerned men pace back & forth. One of the men is (perhaps) the expectant grandfather, but certainly not the father (who for some reason is absent, presumed dead I think). A nurse comes bursting out of the delivery room with an astonished look and announces:
“TWENTY BABIES! All of them BOYS!”
As she rushes past, the grandfather faints dead away into his friends’ arms.
Then there’s a time-lapse dissolve to sometime later when the new mother (looking amazingly resplendent after having given birth to 20(!) babies) is greeted by the Romantic Leading Man (who apparently isn’t entirely up on the situation). They talk about settling down together and he promises he’ll be a great father to her baby as well a great husband to her. Then the grandfather shows up again and takes Romantic Leading Man to see the “new miracle.”
The next scene is shown at the POV from inside the nursery, looking out through the viewing window. We hear a whole gaggle of babies crying while grandfather show off the babies to the Romantic Leading Man. We don’t hear their conversation, but we get a sense of what they’re saying. Romantic Leading Man is puzzled and asking which one of them ‘belongs’ to him. Grandfather mouths the words “All of them!” Romantic Leading Man mouths the words “ALL OF THEM?” and marches back to the new mother’s room.
Once inside, Romantic Leading Man is stammering about the wedding being off, that no way is he taking care of her, no way, no how, no sirree! Grandfather & several nurses try to calm him down.
Dissolve to wedding bells ringing.
As un-p.c. as this sounds, the whole scenario is played out in screwball comedy style - obviously big guffaws & belly laughs were expected from the scene of the Romantic Leading Man flatly dumping the new mother (even if he did end up marrying her.) I remember seeing this on saturday afternoon television when I was a young kid (that would be the mid to late 1970s) and it’s been bothering me for ever what the movie was. Does anybody know it?
