Product: Father of the Bride [VHS] (1950)
Rating: 4.0
A Marriage Made In Hollywood
At some point since the dawning of the age of home videos, we all must have experienced what you might call "filmus interruptus." Movies, almost by definition, were meant to be watched from start to finish, over a span of about two hours (with plenty of exceptions). They were never designed to be "put down" like a book or viewed episodically, like a TV series.But in our busy and eminently interruptible daily lives, it's not uncommon to view a single movie over the course of two or three sittings. And it's sometimes surprising how different a take you wind up having on the same film after as little as a twenty-four layover.Something like that happened to me recently when I started watching Vincente Minnelli's original FATHER OF THE BRIDE. I was sleepy when I started to watch the film on a Friday evening and never expected to be able to watch it to the end. Watching the first hour or so, I found it as witty and charming as I'd expected. Like Minnelli's classic musical MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, it was a gently mocking valentine to American family life--with human foibles not merely tolerated but actually embraced. FATHER OF THE BRIDE, in fact, could be viewed as a kind of 1950s update on the earlier film's major themes: the durability and value of hearth and home over all else. Fathers might see themselves as benign despots, but clever wives and daughters always knew how to wrap the "head of the household" around their little fingers. Social conventions and rituals, especially those surrounding courtship, might be portrayed as somewhat silly, but ultimately harmless. Or maybe even essential--they just may be the glue that holds society together after all.That this movie's themes reflect (and reinforce) Post-War all-American values is no surprise. One can watch this film with a bit of nostalgia for an era in which a father's biggest worry on learning of his daughter's impending marriage is whether or not the girl's fiancé will ever be able to "feed her." (And please, no Joan Rivers type jokes about that being a legit concern, given that the daughter in question was played by Liz Taylor).We have indeed come a long way since then. Almost sixty years on, middle class marriage is a whole `nother institution, more the merger of two career paths than the joining of "man and wife." Not surprisingly, a lot of people miss those "good old days."But the dark side of 1950s suburban life and love has also been successfully portrayed by filmmakers with a less benign vision and a more critical eye. And it just so happened that I between watching "part 1" and "part 2" of FATHER, I caught (well, re-watched, actually) Todd Haynes' devastating take on a similar theme (and--significantly--also set in the 1950s),the powerhouse melodrama FAR FROM PARADISE, which with its themes of racial tension and sexual conflict laid bare the underside of 1950s conventionality.When I went home and innocently starting up FATHER OF THE BRIDE again, I found I almost couldn't bear watching it. A feeling of claustrophobia suddenly crept in that was as surprising as it was discomfiting. Perhaps it had something to do with my picking up the film with Spencer Tracy's genuinely disturbing dream sequence (a hallmark of nearly every Vincente Minnelli film, I'm told). Problem was, Tracy's Stanley Banks character wakes up from the dream to find himself psychically renewed and quite prepared now to deal with the minor hassles and frustrations of the actual wedding. In my newly skeptical frame of mind, I wasn't feeling so tolerant: suddenly, it all seemed like a big lie. This is not how people really live their lives--and never was.Flash forward yet another twenty four hours later, and I find I'm feeling much more charitable towards the film. Yes, there were at least two sides to the 1950s, and, yes, I've known that for years. It doesn't make FATHER OF THE BRIDE any the less witty or warm. Was the world more innocent then? Or was it striving to be more innocent than it could ever really be (especially after the horrors of the WWII). Is there more implicit criticism in this bit of escapist fare than first meets the eye? I'm not sure what might have been the filmmakers' intentions (although it certainly is interesting that Minnelli himself was married four times and has been "outed" as gay or bisexual in more than one bio of his most famous partner, Judy Garland). Escapist works implicity suggest that there is something to escape FROM. True enough. But under most circumstances, I probably would have just succumbed to the film's considerable charms. Let's be fair: when it came to escapist fare, no one did it better than Vincente Minnelli.