Product: Father of the Bride [VHS] (1950)
Rating: 3.0
Dated Froth of the Most Delicious Kind
This piece of 1950s froth is expertly served up by Vincent Minnelli, Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, and a wonderful supporting cast that includes Billie Burke, Moroni Olsen, and Leo G. Carroll, the latter doing a priceless turn as a supercilious wedding caterer.The film is as interesting as a record of the values of the times, as it is for the masterful performance by Spencer Tracy, who manages to make something out of what is, essentially, nothing. Well, that's what froth is: air with a bit of cream in it.Kay Banks is twenty, the only daughter of a successful lawyer, who is living the upper-middle-class Life of Reilly at home with her parents in an immaculate suburb. She has left high school, is not attending college, and clearly does not have and never has had, a job. She is manifestly waiting around for Mr. Right to appear. Mr. Right's appearance is only a matter of time, because Kay is played by an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor who is so astonishingly beautiful that the film generates heavy ruminations about the random injustice of the bestowal of genetic gifts. The film also hit the public relations jackpot by being released within a week of the young Taylor's (first) real-life wedding to hotel heir Nicky Hilton, in a bridal gown considerably less demure than the one she finally appears in at the end of this film.Kay, with three brothers, is her father's darling. Dad is played by Spencer Tracy, who manages to be simultaneously gruff, tender, baffled, and shrewd. It's no small feat to walk off with a movie alongside two women as lovely and charming as Taylor and a still-striking Joan Bennett, whose fair, brunette looks, slender figure, and blue eyes make her eminently plausible as Taylor's mother, if not as the middle-aged mother of four grown children. Bennett's no-nonsense Mom is a perfect foil to Tracy's nonplussed-Dad.As the film opens, Kay announces that Mr. Right ("Buckley Dunstan", if you please!) has indeed appeared, and she is engaged to be married. The rest of the film is taken up with Stanley Banks's struggle with the idea of giving up his adult daughter, and his vain attempts to resist the feminine wedding fever that steamrolls over him and the rest of the household. The film culminates in a very pretty wedding in which the camera focuses dreamily, almost nonstop, on a nearly mute Taylor. The Anglican wedding service (this is Middle America's Dream WASP Family) DOES require both parties to recite the "to have and to hold" litany, but all Taylor gets to murmur is "I will."The film supports Minnelli's reputation for flair with surface style and charm. But to a modern viewer, the film is most remarkable for the question it does not address: what is a reasonably intelligent, twenty-year-old woman doing living at home with her parents, having never earned a single penny, still sleeping in the adorably fluffy bedroom she grew up in?The short answer, for the film's purposes, anyway, is Taylor's looks. Because, really, would anyone accept her as a nurse or a kindergarten teacher, or a secretary, or any of the other careers that might have been thought suitable for a girl so placed in 1950? Taylor's almost surreal beauty makes anything but a social destiny ludicrous to contemplate, and justifies the film's underlying premise: all this girl is fit for is to wait for Mr. Right, get those looks off the marriage-market and out of the way of other girls, and into a nice house where she can set about passing on her genetic windfall.Among women today, struggling to juggle careers, advanced degrees, mortgage payments, divorce, children, etc., the film may cause some twinges of vestigial envy. Kay's father is SO proud of her on her wedding day: she waits for EXACTLY the right moment to start marching down the aisle! At twenty, that is the greatest challenge she has ever faced. The worst moment Kay has throughout the film is finding out that Buckley wants to go fishing in Nova Scotia on their honeymoon, rather than someplace where she can show off the lovely frocks she has purchased (that is, that her father has purchased) for her honeymoon trousseau. Even Mr. Banks is stunned at the uproar she creates over this discovery.For those who have not always experienced the social upheavals of the last few decades as entirely beneficial, this film occasionally hits below the fantasy-belt, as Kay moves effortlessly from the adoring shelter of her father's lap to the adoring shelter of her husband's. Kay Banks's life, of course, didn't reflect reality even in 1950 - but that the fantasy of her life can still generate so much secret longing accounts, I suspect, for the affection in which this ridiculous story continues to be held.Sigh. Well, it is a deliciously ridiculous story, with endearing performances, and worth having if only for Tracy's, which confirms his status as one of the canniest and most skillful of American actors.But is it really just 60 years since audiences turned this film into one of the era's biggest hits? Watching it today, it might as well be 600.