Life with Father (1947)
A strained, loud, stiff, but rich, snappy affair...an acquired taste!
I think this movie might be very funny to some people, but at first I could barely watch it. It has one of my favorite comic actors of the 1930s, William Powell, but makes him so pompous and loud and ill at ease, he has lost all of his wry charm and genuine humor. Not that he jokes or even tries to be comic here, but his role (as the "father" in question) is offputting.
The sons are frankly bad actors in bad roles, too, cardboard, smiling clichés. The visiting girlfriend is none other than a young and fresh Liz Taylor (she's fifteen here), and she brings life to some scenes just as often as she overacts others. The upper crust New York household with its rules and with its whole family about to burst from all the restrictions (poverty not one of them, for sure) is not really funny. The filming is static, the camera stable, the light garish, and the color (Technicolor) egregious (everyone has red hair, it seems). Even after an hour I was still wondering what exactly the whole point of it was. Can we really just be waiting for the girl to hook up with one of the sons, as the father rants in strident tones about the price of a coffee pot?
No, we can't. What makes the movie work is the building of familiarity with the characters, so their humor, their occasional warmth, and the real, unfunny events later on have their effect.
The lead character's wife, played by Irene Dunne, is a relief, though she can't save every scene any more than Taylor can. Director Michael Curtiz is known for making scores of reasonable but not especially memorable movies, but hey, he made one of the best, Casablanca, and one of my favorites, Mildred Pierce. This is more typical, sadly. The story is based on the true childhood memories of the American writer Clarence Day (of no fame other than this material, which was a huge Broadway hit before the movie was made).
So I go back to where I started--this really might be funny if you have a different take on it all, or you don't find Powell grating in his role. It clips along with lots of yelling, so maybe if you like Carol Burnett you'll be okay. Ha. Seriously, relax and accept the characters for something very different than we expect 130 years later, and everyone will grow on you.
A strained, loud, stiff, but rich, snappy affair...an acquired taste!
I think this movie might be very funny to some people, but at first I could barely watch it. It has one of my favorite comic actors of the 1930s, William Powell, but makes him so pompous and loud and ill at ease, he has lost all of his wry charm and genuine humor. Not that he jokes or even tries to be comic here, but his role (as the "father" in question) is offputting.
The sons are frankly bad actors in bad roles, too, cardboard, smiling clichés. The visiting girlfriend is none other than a young and fresh Liz Taylor (she's fifteen here), and she brings life to some scenes just as often as she overacts others. The upper crust New York household with its rules and with its whole family about to burst from all the restrictions (poverty not one of them, for sure) is not really funny. The filming is static, the camera stable, the light garish, and the color (Technicolor) egregious (everyone has red hair, it seems). Even after an hour I was still wondering what exactly the whole point of it was. Can we really just be waiting for the girl to hook up with one of the sons, as the father rants in strident tones about the price of a coffee pot?
No, we can't. What makes the movie work is the building of familiarity with the characters, so their humor, their occasional warmth, and the real, unfunny events later on have their effect.
The lead character's wife, played by Irene Dunne, is a relief, though she can't save every scene any more than Taylor can. Director Michael Curtiz is known for making scores of reasonable but not especially memorable movies, but hey, he made one of the best, Casablanca, and one of my favorites, Mildred Pierce. This is more typical, sadly. The story is based on the true childhood memories of the American writer Clarence Day (of no fame other than this material, which was a huge Broadway hit before the movie was made).
So I go back to where I started--this really might be funny if you have a different take on it all, or you don't find Powell grating in his role. It clips along with lots of yelling, so maybe if you like Carol Burnett you'll be okay. Ha. Seriously, relax and accept the characters for something very different than we expect 130 years later, and everyone will grow on you.