8 Movies | Sundays
After a look at mothers in the movies throughout the month of May, TCM flips to the other side of the parental coin in June with a month-long tribute to dads of all types – loving and cruel, self-sacrificing and self-absorbed, wise and befuddled and always looming large in the lives of their children.
The month kicks off with a double bill of two highly successful releases about the fictional Banks family, first introduced in a 1949 novel by Edward Streeter. Father of the Bride (1950) was adapted for the screen by married writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the team who brought the witty duo Nick and Nora Charles to movie audiences in The Thin Man (1934). They brought that same sense of sparkling humor to this domestic comedy with “warmth and poignancy and understanding” (Bosley Crowther, The New York Times).
Director Vincente Minnelli was coming off a string of critically and commercially disappointing features and facing another lackluster assignment by his home studio, MGM when producer Pandro Berman “rescued” him to work on this story about a suburban family thrown into turmoil by their daughter’s pending wedding. Particularly hard hit is dad Stanley (Spencer Tracy), who not only has to contend with increasing demands on his time, patience and bank account but must deal with conflicting feelings of pride, concern, jealousy and neglect as he watches his only daughter (Elizabeth Taylor) start her grown-up life with another man.
Tracy was one of Hollywood’s most respected actors, bringing a solid naturalness to both comedy and drama, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Yet, he almost didn’t appear in the picture. Minnelli never had thoughts of any other actor to play the titular father, around whom the story revolves, but at some point, word got out that MGM’s head of production, Dore Schary, had all but promised Jack Benny the role. Accounts vary as to how it all played out, but Minnelli was told Tracy had turned down the part. The director had to enlist the help of his friend Katharine Hepburn to woo the actor back. Tracy’s participation virtually guaranteed a success.
Prospects for the picture were also boosted greatly by the casting of Taylor, then one of the most sought-after young stars in Hollywood. The chemistry between her and Tracy made for a highly convincing father-daughter relationship on screen, mirrored by the real-life affection between them. For the rest of their lives, they referred to each other by their characters’ nicknames, “Kitten” and “Pops.” The box office potential wasn’t hurt a bit, either, by Taylor’s fairy tale wedding to her first husband, hotel heir Nicky Hilton, a few weeks before the film was released in June 1950.
Fortunately, the demise of Taylor’s marriage after eight months didn’t detract from the success of the sequel, Father’s Little Dividend (1951), released in April 1951. Minnelli, Goodrich and Hackett, and much of the original cast were back on board for another warmly comic look at the family welcoming the daughter’s newborn. Once again, the story is told from dad’s point of view as he struggles to mediate the young parents’ marital woes and forge a bond with a baby that clearly wants nothing to do with him.
Fathers and daughters and weddings are at the heart of a different film in Fiddler on the Roof (1971), showing on the second night of the series. The tale of Tevye the milkman trying to preserve his family and their Jewish traditions in early 20th century Tsarist Russia dates back to stories by Sholem Aleichem that had been dramatized on stage and screen decades before being turned into a hit Broadway musical in 1964. With only a handful of small changes to the stage production, the film was a commercial success, despite controversy over casting little-known Israeli actor Topol over Zero Mostel, who had made the role his own on Broadway. Director Norman Jewison, however, felt that Mostel’s outsized personality and acting style would overwhelm the character. Some reviewers noted that literalizing the story by placing it in realistic settings had lessened the transcendent nature of the musical, but most reviews were positive and the film won numerous awards.
From the shtetls of Russia, the evening’s program takes a U-turn to smalltown America in the 30s with Judge Hardy and Son (1939), the eighth movie in MGM’s popular Andy Hardy series starring Mickey Rooney. Dad was always an important part of those pictures, dispensing sage advice and firm guidance to his adolescent son, but here he is the catalyst for Andy’s misadventure, enlisting the boy’s help in finding the estranged daughter of an Italian immigrant couple in danger of losing their home. Once again, veteran actor Lewis Stone plays the venerable judge, as he did in all but the first release in the 16-picture series (that was Lionel Barrymore) and the last, made five years after his death. Stone also commanded top billing in all but one of his Andy Hardy appearances, despite the stories revolving around Rooney’s character.
The Father’s Day program showcases another film with long literary and theatrical roots. Life with Father (1947) was adapted from a 1939 play by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, the longest-running non-musical in Broadway history, inspired by humorous autobiographical stories by Clarence Day, a stockbroker and essayist for The New Yorker magazine. William Powell plays the curmudgeonly dad in 1880s New York, vainly trying to keep his family running as tightly and smoothly as his Wall Street firm. The real head of the family, however, appears to be Mom, played by Irene Dunne in one of her last roles before retiring from motion pictures a few years later. Fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor is here again, playing the love interest of one of Powell’s sons. The hit movie was turned into a TV series in 1953.
Mom is completely absent in the second film of the night, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963). Glenn Ford plays a widower raising his young son (future film director Ron Howard at just 8 years old) who doesn’t approve of Dad’s choices in women. Stella Stevens and Dina Merrill are some of the women who come into the duo’s lives as Eddie tries to steer his father to the better option, next-door neighbor Shirley Jones. Vincente Minnelli directs again. The story was adapted to a TV series in 1969.
Things get noticeably darker on the final Sunday of the month with a look at a couple of fathers who fail their children rather miserably. East of Eden (1955), based on the fourth and final part of John Steinbeck’s epic 1952 novel, features James Dean in his first starring screen role as a young man at constant loggerheads with his stern and unloving father (Raymond Massey) in 1917 California. Now considered one of director Elia Kazan’s best films, it got mixed reviews on its release, with most of the attention focused on Dean’s star-making and influential performance. The story, like the book, is loosely woven around the Biblical tale of rival brothers Cain and Abel. Kazan initially thought of casting Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift as the brothers but went with the more appropriately aged Dean and Richard Davalos (after testing Paul Newman, too). Mom is again absent from much of the story until she turns up in a brothel, played by Jo Van Fleet in a performance that won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
The series concludes with The Entertainer (1960), based on a 1957 John Osborne play that was a great success for Laurence Olivier at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Osborne was the leading light of what became known as the “kitchen-sink school” of British drama at the time, famous for its “angry young man” protagonists. It was written expressly for Olivier at his request, giving him a character unlike any he had played before – a bottom-rung vaudevillian named Archie Rice. Tony Richardson, who directed the original production, described him as “the embodiment of a national mood ... Archie was the future, the decline, the sourness, the ashes of old glory, where Britain was heading.” The film received mostly good notices and a Best Actor nomination for Olivier but didn’t fare as well with the public, despite the popularity of similar working-class dramas in the British New Wave cinema of the early 1960s.
Joan Plowright plays Archie’s daughter, a young woman in emotional turmoil who travels to a rundown English seaside resort to visit her family. Her father is too involved in his own legal and financial problems, his fading career and an affair with a younger woman to offer her any help or even a shred of attention. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther observed that the film was “an antidote to all the bromides about show people being lovely folk, amusing, courageous, soft-hearted and dedicated to spreading sunshine in the world...a devastating picture of a hollow, hypocritical heel and of the pitiful people around him who are drowned in his grubby vanity.” Their on-screen conflict notwithstanding, Olivier and Plowright soon married.
