Father of the Bride (1950)

Compared to some of the other nominees for Best Picture of 1950, Father of the Bride is pretty inconsequential material. When you consider that the competition included such masterpieces as All about Eve, the winner, and Sunset Boulevard, what chance could a charming little domestic comedy have at winning the big prize? As enjoyable as Father of the Bride is, and it certainly has its entertaining moments, it just doesn't hold up as an award-worthy accomplishment. Even Born Yesterday and King Solomon's Mines, the two other nominees for Best Picture that year, have more to recommend them to a viewer nowadays in terms of contributions to film history.

Spencer Tracy plays Stanley Banks, a respectable middle-class lawyer whose daughter Kay (played by Elizabeth Taylor) is his favorite child. He has two other children, Ben and Tommy, two sons, but it's Kay on whom he dotes. At dinner one night, he and his wife Ellie (Joan Bennett) learn that Kay has gotten engaged to her boyfriend Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor) without even knowing that the two kids had gotten that serious about each other. In fact, Stanley has to flip through a montage of her boyfriends to try to determine which one she's discussing. If I recall correctly, it turns out Buckley's the one he describes as "the musclebound ham with the shoulders," a not altogether inaccurate description of the actor who plays him either.

What follows are a series of events that, at times, border on the slapstick. Stanley tries to have a conversation about finances with young Buckley, but it fails, of course, because he's really in love with Kay and nothing can dissuade him from marrying her. When Mr. and Mrs. Banks meet Buckley's parents, Stanley gets drunk and spends the entire evening talking non-stop about Kay, finally falling asleep to the relief of everyone involved. At the engagement party, he never even makes it out of the kitchen because everyone wants something different to drink, leaving all of his martinis untouched. Each of these moments is played rather broadly by Tracy and the others, and each is a funny vignette.

Planning for the event itself becomes one headache after another. Kay's mother keeps buying her daughter expensive clothes for her trousseau, and they cannot seem to whittle the guest list down to a manageable size. It stands at 572 for the wedding and 280 for the reception, far more than they could reasonably expect to invite. It gets so exasperating for Stanley that he offers Kay money if she and Buckley will just elope. And the visit to the wedding planner played by Leo G. Carroll is, as you might expect, hilarious. Every suggestion gets shot down, and the expense and complexity of the reception keep increasing. When the film was remade in 1991 with Steve Martin in the Tracy role, Martin Short took over for Carroll, and, frankly, he made the character into a caricature, something the understated Carroll himself never does.

You know, don't you, that there has to be a complication that almost causes the wedding's cancellation? It's over the honeymoon. The groom wants to go fishing in Nova Scotia, an odd choice for a honeymoon destination, certainly, but just seeing him again makes Kay change her mind and take him back. Once again, Tracy's Stanley is disappointed. Perhaps that's what leads to the film's most unusual sequence, a dream Stanley has about sinking into the floor as he tries to walk down the aisle. His clothes get ripped, and the guests are all appalled, as you might expect them to be. It's quite a nightmare, and it stands out in the film for the cleverness with which it is depicted and for its rather surrealistic nature.

The film has a framing device of tracking the devastation of the Banks family's home after the party. It's quite a mess with glasses and bottles and food and confetti and destruction everywhere. Tracy tells the story of what has led to this disaster in a voice-over throughout the movie. Apparently, all of the events took place in just three months, which has to qualify this wedding as being one of the fastest to be planned and executed in history. It's hard to believe that, after all of the problems the bride and groom and their families have faced, all goes well. The reception is another disaster for Stanley personally, but in the end, he and Ellie are able to dance among the wreckage of their home, happy that it has all ended (and perhaps grateful that they have only one daughter).

This was Taylor's first adult role as an actress, and she's beautiful here. She would use her looks and talent to greater effect a year later in A Place in the Sun, but she's competent here in what is truly a supporting role, after all. Bennett and the two actors who play the Banks sons (Russ Tamblyn in an early role for him and Tom Irish) really have little to do here except react to whatever moments Tracy's character presents. Carroll steals the few minutes that he has on screen, making the most of our own preconceived ideas about what weddings and receptions and their planners entail. But it's Tracy to whom we owe the overall success of the film. I never really would have pegged Tracy as an actor grounded in physical comedy, but he manages to do some deft work here. He was nominated for Best Actor for this role, but really, it's not that much of a stretch for someone with a natural gift like his.

Father of the Bride was directed by Vincente Minnelli, who would achieve greater fame for directing classic musicals like An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, and Gigi (and for being married to Judy Garland and fathering Liza Minnelli). His direction here is assured, classical Hollywood film making, perhaps the reason he and several of the cast returned a year later to make a sequel, Father's Little Dividend, about what happens after the birth of Stanley's first grandchild. Thankfully, that one wasn't nominated for Best Picture, so I can skip seeing it again.

Oscar Nominations: Picture, Actor (Tracy), and Screenplay