Tag: Don Taylor

Father of the Bride (1950)

Gentle, well-made comedy is elevated by a star turn from Spencer Tracy

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Cast: Spencer Tracy (Stanley Banks), Joan Bennett (Ellie Banks), Elizabeth Taylor (Kay Banks), Don Taylor (Buckley Dunstan), Billie Burke (Doris Dunstan), Leo G. Carroll (Mr Massoula), Moroni Olsen (Herbert Dunstan), Melville Cooper (Mr Tringle)

Apparently almost 70% of couples find wedding planning stressful. Perhaps they would be reassured to hear things haven’t changed much since the 1950s! Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) is a successful partner in a law firm whose domestic bliss is disrupted when daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) announces she intends to marry boyfriend Buckley (Don Taylor). With the support of her mother Ellie (Joan Bennett), Kay dreams of a big church wedding – and Stanley is left counting the cost while struggling with his sadness at his daughter growing up and flying the nest for good.

Father of the Bride delightfully takes a simple idea and mines it for as much comic effect as possible. The structure is simple: the build-up to and staging of the wedding, with all absurdities of such things as fussy caterers and exacting church wardens pointed up. There are minor bumps and hiccups, but nothing that would make a viewer ever seriously worry that all will not turn out well. Instead, the film riffs on the constant exasperation of a father watching the plans (and cost) of the wedding spiral ever upwards, as more and more extras pile on top of others.

Much of its success is linked to Spencer Tracy, excellent as the eponymous father. The role was written for him and Minnelli demanded he should play it when producers suggested a more comic actor like Jack Benny might fit the bill better. (Katherine Hepburn did not take on the wife, though I can’t imagine she would found much to engage her in Joan Bennett’s underwritten role.) The entire success of the film revolves around our connection with Tracy, something never in doubt with his skill and assurance.

Minnelli cements this with an opening shot panning across wedding debris before craning up to introduce us to a fourth-wall breaking speech of resigned weariness from Tracy. His narrative voice is returned to again and again, as Tracy shares a wry and exasperated commentary. Father of the Bride is a testament to Tracy’s comic chops, his mastery of the micro-reaction providing constant laughs, from a look of disbelief across a dining table to one of shock as the latest bill flies in. It’s a hilariously effective performance, in which Tracy embraces the ridiculousness of farce. Like a practiced comedian he spays himself (three times) while attempting to open a coke or kids himself into believing he looks dandy in a morning suit several years too small for him.

But the performance – and the film – really works because Tracy also communicate its humanity. In his relationship with Elizabeth Taylor (suitably radiant as Kay, and full of a forceful personality she surely inherited from her father), Tracy makes clear his love for his daughter and his sadness at an end of an era: he won’t be ‘the man’ in her life anymore. Even with small inconsequential moments (such as Kay ignoring Stanley’s appeal to wear a coat before fetching it immediately when Buckley suggests the same), Tracy shows sadness dance across his face. The wedding is awash with bittersweet moments, with Tracy as harried host desperately attempting to speak with his daughter one last time before she leaves. Father of the Bride through Tracy’s performance mines a great deal of quiet, genuine emotion from a parent struggling with a child grown up.

It’s a bittersweet thread Minnelli’s film keeps pinging away under the comedy. Minnelli seems an unlikely choice (you’d expect a Cukor or Capra), but his skill with composition adds to the film without overwhelming the slender story with flash. The opening shot of wedding debris prepares us for the hustle and bustle of the big day, where a parade of carefully choreographed background events in the Banks’ house is as skilled as the bustling crowds of the event. Minnelli gives a Dali-inspired flair to Banks’ pre-wedding nightmare (his feet melting into the ground and clothes falling apart) and he plugs into Tracy’s reactive skill to frame these off-the-ball moments for maximum impact.

Editing also helps accentuate jokes. On hearing his daughter intends to marry, Banks reflects with horror on who this suitor might be, a montage of assorted suitors (from athletic, to bookish, to dancing) spooling past us. (The biggest joke now might be how utterly safe all these suitors are, the sort of lads you imagine fathers today would be desperate for daughters to bring home). Minnelli also fades in and out on blurry close-ups on glasses to communicate both the passing of time and Stanley’s rising inebriation (after a growing parade of martinis) when the Banks meet with Buckley’s parents.

This sort of comic energy helps carry the film very effectively. Of course it is all very simple – the 1991 remake added more moments of crisis and obstacles for the characters to overcome – and that can explain why events sometimes feel stretched out even over its slim 90-minute run time. For all the film’s tagline (“Bride gets the thrills; Father gets the bills!”) suggests frustration on Stanley’s part, moments where he weeds through a huge invite list (525!) or bemoans paying for an orchestra no one is listening to are generally underplayed (perhaps it was thought we could only sympathise so much before starting to think of Tracy as a penny pincher?)

But, overall, the film works very well indeed, mostly due to Spencer Tracy’s hugely effective performance – funny, endearing, likeable and hugely relatable with a perfect balance between comedy and emotional depth. It would have been nice to have had more of a contrast between Stanley and Buckley – when Buckley turns up to a heart-to-heart with father-in-law clutching a briefcase full of his work, I immediately thought ‘never has a woman more clearly married someone like her dad’. But what the film aims to do it, it succeeds at. And that’s to have some good-natured, heart-warming fun showing how even stars like Tracy can find weddings stressful.

Battleground (1949)

Marvellously realistic, grunt’s-eye view of war, very well made and still carrying impact

Director: William A Wellman

Cast: Van Johnson (PFC Holley), John Hodiak (Pvt Jarvess), Ricardo Montalbán (Pvt Roderigues), George Murphy (Pvt “Pop” Stazak), Marshall Thompson (Pvt Layton), Jerome Courtland Pvt Abner Spudler), Don Taylor (Cpl Standiferd), Bruce Cowling (Sgt Wolowicz), James Whitmore (Staff Sgt Kinnie), Douglas Fowley (Pvt “Kipp” Kippton), Leon Ames (Chaplain), Herbert Anderson (Pvt Hansan), Denise Darcel (Denise), Richard Jaeckel (Pvt Bettis)

Apparently, the Hays Code would let bad language slide, if it was being used about War Heroes. Not many 40s film start with a credit crawl proudly calling its cast a bunch of bastards (in this case “the Bastards of Boulogne”). That’s our Battleground, the Battle of the Bulge, based on the experiences of screenwriter Robert Pirosh (who won an Oscar). Reflecting Pirosh’s experience, this is the Battle from the Grunt-eye-view, following a platoon of privates and sergeants pushed up from the rear to Bastogne, filling in the time between terrifying shelling and German advances, with grouching about everything from the food, to the lack of leave to the rotten army life.

As such, it’s not a surprise that Battleground proved a huge, multi-Oscar nominated hit (including Best Picture). Many in the audience surely saw their own war experiences reflected back at them: crappy rations, freezing cold fox-holes and the horrifying prospect of sudden death from the sky, that many American GIs knew from the war. Louis B Mayer believed the country was sick of war but producer Dore Schary persisted and was proved absolutely right.

It’s a film soaking in authenticity, that genuinely feels like it’s been filmed in the mist and snow covered chill of Boulogne rather than the sunny uplands of California (it’s cinematography won a deserved Oscar for Paul C Vogel). Director, William A Wellman, a decorated veteran from World War One, not only knew how soldiers thought, he was also grimly familiar with the mix of machismo, grit and terror on the front. Most of the cast were veterans, some only just out of uniform: and Battleground was the first film that put its cast through boot-camp to get them bonding like a company.

It’s a film rooted in the detail of army banter, with the same topics coming up time-and-again, in the distinctive language of the trenches. There is the insular togetherness of men who have seen a great deal of suffering and survived. Where a fellow soldier may get on your nerves but you’ll defend him to the death. The suspicion and dismissive attitude to replacement recruits until they have earned their chops. The delight in small moments of humanity also ring true: the Californian private thrilled at seeing snow for the first time, the protective way Van Johnson’s Private Holly guards and protects the eggs he’s dying to eat, the eager joy (and suppressed disappointment) when mail arrives (or fails to). These little touches make the characters feel real, their bonds feel lived in – and makes their moments of fear and panic all the more real.

And Battleground is perhaps unique in 40s war films for not judging soldiers when they show fear (in fact, when new recruit Layton confesses to being scared out of his wits, grizzled cynic Jarvess supportively congratulates him on joining a club everyone is a member of). When the men re-encounter Bettis, a man who ran at the first shelling, there is no judgement or condemnation towards him. After all, so many of them nearly did it themselves. All of them fear becoming a bleeding heap, sobbing for their mamas (as we see one of them do in a quietly affecting moment). Private Holly, our closest thing to a hero, twice nearly cuts-and-runs but both times circumstances and self-reproach see him disguise this with acts of bravery. Others may suspect the truth, but it’s what a man does that matters not why he does it.

Battleground gives a focus most war film never give. There are no generals, no sense of tactics or scale and precious little of the enemy. The Battle of the Bulge is a slog, sitting in a snow-filled pit trying not to die. Paranoia and fear is constant: news of German’s disguised as GIs lead to several awkward encounters, including a darkly funny scene of patrols demanding each other to name various pieces of American trivia to prove their bona fidas (even a senior officer). When they sit down to read the GI news, the men are mystified not only about who they are fighting (“Who is von Rundstedt?”) but even the name the press give the battle (“What’s the Bulge?”). Half of them have no idea where they are (opinion seems divided on Belgium or Luxembourg), few speak French and there is a sense that what the war is about matters less than surviving it.

Perhaps to combat this, in a potentially sentimental moment that Wellman and Pirosh manage to make feel uplifting, an army chaplin (well played by Leon Ames) assures the men ‘why they fight’ really does matter – and that if, later, people question the point of sending young Americans thousands of miles to die for strangers, then they know not of what they speak. In Battleground this sense of pride and honour, that what they are doing matters, is an essential battery recharge after weeks of freezing struggle: and it still carries real impact now, reflecting on what so many did for a cause larger than themselves.

Battleground’s cast is largely made up of MGM contract players seizing the opportunity to embody the sort of gritty, earthy parts so rarely available to actors serving in second-string roles or uninteresting leads in B-movies. Van Johnson’s Holly masks his fear with rumbunctious enthusiasm and exaggerated moaning. George Murphy gives a career-best turn as a determined veteran, ready to go home. John Hodiak’s Jarvess is a pillar of wisdom, Ricardo Montalbán’s Roderigues a burst of exuberant life. James Whitmore (Oscar-nominated) as Sergeant Kinnie practically defines Hollywood’s view of the grizzled, grouchy sergeant who secretly loves his men.

It all comes together very well and if Battleground feels overlong and even a bit repetitive at times, that’s to be expected considering it’s reflecting the experience of its characters. But there can be few 40s films as clear-eyed, realistic and unjudgmental about the pressures ordinary soldiers felt under extraordinary circumstances. That focused on the grim slog of surviving, over the glamour of conventional heroism in battle. And perhaps that’s why Battleground spoke to so many and feels so different.

Stalag 17 (1953)

William Holden is the untrusted fixer in Billy Wilder’s prison camp drama Stalag 17

Director: Billy Wilder

Cast: William Holden (JJ Sefton), Don Taylor (Lieutenant Dunbar), Otto Preminger (Colonel von Scherbach), Robert Strauss (Stanislas ‘Animal’ Kuzara), Harvey Lembeck (Harry Shapiro), Peter Graves (Price), Sig Rumann (Sgt Johann Sebastian Schulz), Neville Brand (Duke), Richard Erdman (Hoffy)

A sort of cross between The Great Escape and Colditz (but not as good as either), Stalag 17 is a relatively minor entry into Billy Wilder’s illustrious cannon: but that makes it more than good enough to be a stand-out movie in anybody else’s. Set in a German prisoner of war camp for captured American NCOs, it follows the hunt for a traitor leaking escape plans to the Germans. The suspicions of the other inmates quickly turn to camp fixer JJ Sefton (William Holden), a self-serving, cynical outsider, despite his protestations of innocence. When a saboteur and POW is betrayed to the Germans, Sefton decides he needs to locate the stool pigeon himself.

The main historical interest in Stalag 17 is William Holden’s Oscar-winning performance. Holden apparently walked out of the original Broadway production of the play, but such was his trust in Wilder’s judgement he agreed to play the substantially rewritten role. Just as well he did, as Holden’s drawling cynicism, air of bitterness and the marvellous impression he is able to give of a man of commitment and principle under the veneer of a self-serving egotist are perfect for it. Holden won the Oscar (he believed it was a consolation for his failure to win for Sunset Boulevard) – and co-incidentally gave the shortest acceptance speech ever (due to TV coverage rules), a simple “thank you.”

Holden’s character slowly dominates the narrative more and more, but is often shot on the margins of the film. Wilder shoots a film where the lead character is on the periphery of the action, with Holden on the edge of frames, or just being caught by the camera as it drifts towards him. He feels like a supporting character for a large chunk of the first half of the film, while Wilder focuses on the daily life and bonhomie of the camp: two things Sefton deliberately exiles himself from. But you keep coming back to him, and are always aware of what he is thinking and planning.

The focus on the atmosphere of the camp allows a number of fun scenes around the isolation of the men. There are joyful celebrations for Christmas (including tree decorations and a full dance in the barracks, with men eagerly grabbing each other for a whirl in a way you can’t imagine them doing back home). We get the games and in-jokes that keep them sane, the cheeking of the guards, and the obsessive interest in the women held in the Russian camp next door.

This also allows a number of colourful performances from a solid group of character actors. Robert Strauss was Oscar-nominated as the scruffy, Betty-Grable-obsessed “Animal”, and his comic antics provide much of the film’s humour. There are fine performances from Harvey Lembeck as his confidante (Lembeck and Strauss had both played the same roles in the stage production), while Peter Graves, Neville Brand and Richard Erdman contribute performances as very different POWs.

The film also deals with mob dynamics: the group turns on Sefton, it seems, because he dares to bet against an escape and, as a fixer, he has access to luxuries the rest of the group don’t have (and charges them to access). Throw in his distance and his happiness not to make friends and it’s clear why they suspect him. But that doesn’t make their brutal punishment of him (on no evidence) and their cruel ostracism any easier to watch. You can’t help suspecting that Wilder had more than half his mind on the McCarthy trials taking place at the time when he was filming this mob-justice film.

The film is also notable for making the Germans reasonably fully-formed characters. Sure, our two main characters are, to varying degrees, ruthless buffoons, but they are not vicious or cruel. Otto Preminger’s camp commandant is a puffed-up martinet who puts his boots on when calling a General merely so he can click the heels together (and immediately removes them when the call is complete). Sig Rumann’s barracks guard is a decent cove and bluff braggart, who actually runs a fairly efficient spy system with the traitor.

The film is partly a study of men under pressure and partly a mystery – obviously Sefton isn’t the traitor, and the film slowly reveals who is before an impressive sequence where we see the traitor in action planting a message. There is a noir-ish quality to this mystery element, and the film holds a balance fairly well between a war comedy and an adventure where lives really are at stake (it’s book-ended by characters being machine gunned by the Germans after all). It’s not the greatest war film ever, but it has more than enough going for it.