Plot:
- by Zoë Shaw
The Rose home is a happy place. That frankness also lends itself to some of the most straightforward "birds and bees" straightforward "birds and bees" talk yet to hit the screen.

Free-to-view versions might be available digitally. Themselves Mr. and Mrs. Grant and Miss Drake spark the film with the humor it needs without neglecting any of the honest tugs at the heart the story has. Not as popular as Bringing Up Baby, Affair to Remember, or the many films he made with Alfred Hitchcock, Room for One More lacks the laughs of a screwball comedy or the thrills of being divebombed by a malevolent crop duster.

And speaking of revealing, Dear Old Dad or not, Cary has a wow of a scene wearing a pair of white swimming trunks and not much else! You will find yourself pulling for Jimmy John as he struggles to ride a bike.

While Poppy is concerned about the added expense two more children will incur, he is resigned to the fact that Anna’s strong maternal instincts will win the day.

Instead, Room for One More is a quiet, family-oriented film based on the true story by Anna Perrott Rose.

Both of the fostered children come to the Rose household under their own, unique circumstances. They include Lurene Tuttle, Randy Stuart, John Ridgely, Irving Bacon and Mary Lou Treen.

Production-wise, film benefits from the excellent Robert Burks photography and the easy-listening Max Steiner music score. 

NEW YORK TIMES Film Review - January 16, 1952
- by Bosley Crowther
- submitted by Barry Martin
Regard and affection for children are proper sentiments, to say the least, and warm generosity toward the nippers is a loveable adult trait.  Particularly is it attractive when directed toward children other than one's own.  (No need to go any further into an endorsement of parental love.)  And that is why most of the Warners' new comedy, "Room for One More," which came yesterday to the Warner Theatre, makes for generally appealing movie fare.

So long as this anecdotal look-in upon the experience of a husband and wife in bringing up two foster children, as well as three of their own, sticks simply to the humorous complications that arise in a house full of kids, plus appropriate livestock and paraphernalia, it has genuine gaiety and domestic charm.  For writers Jack Rose and Melville Shavelson have plucked some amusing episodes of communal life in an energetic family from the book by Anna Perrott Rose, and Cary Grant, Betsy Drake and a gang of youngsters play these episodes winningly.

There are few people in the business who can cock their heads and pop their eyes at an event such as a cat having kittens under the kitchen stove with quite the amusing vexation that Mr.

Grant can manage to show.  His tolerance toward the manifold inconveniences that a burdened father inevitably endures is the sort that should be the soothing solace and encouragement of every papa in the land.  
Likewise, Miss Drake gives a nice show of maternal solicitude toward all and sundry of God's living creatures that come within her ken - the sort that should dangerously parboil the cockles of every woman's heart.  And Iris Mann as a briefly rebellious adopted daughter, Clifford Tatum Jr.

as a tough adopted son and George Winslow as the inevitably cute tadpole (aged 5) are appealing, too, so long as they are kept within the traces of reasonable problems and behavior of the young.

Even a measure of the sentiment the picture is shaped to generate over the loneliness of the foster children has validity.  The resentments of unwanted children are fairly well realized, and some of the simple devices for overcoming such resentments are touchingly displayed.  But when the tugs on the heartstrings are expanded into forceful and uninhibited pulls, leading out from the foster son, a cripple, then mawkishness sets in.  And the climax becomes a maudlin set-to with the Boy Scout oath and the American flag.

Also - and this we mention primly - there is a little more sport than need be made of the manner in which the children interfere with the cuddling of pa and ma.  That's an old joke, and being extended to the length of a running gag, it becomes not only tedious but just a wee bit unwholesome, we would say.  An intricate Freudian situation is suggested in the handling of this gag, and that's not a very fortunate suggestion in an essentially uncomplicated film, having to do with children and the joyful recompenses thereof.

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