A young couple, Buckley Dunstan and Kay Banks, fall in love, get engaged and then get married. (The name "Kay" here, as is common in America, is a diminutive of Katherine; in Britain it is more often used as a name in its own right). As the title suggests, however, the film is less about Buckley and Kay than it is about her father, Stanley, and how he copes with preparations for her wedding.
The film is essentially a one-joke comedy, the joke being that Stanley is a both a tight-fisted old grumbler and a neurotic worrier. Although underneath all his grumbling and worrying he loves his daughter dearly, he spends virtually the whole film grumbling and worrying about the wedding, particularly about how much it is going to cost him, even though as a successful partner in a law firm his pockets are presumably much deeper than he pretends. He tries to cut down on the guest list, but has to give way to his wife who has set her heart on a particularly elaborate wedding, and insists on holding the reception at his home (which does not really seem large enough to accommodate 250 guests) rather than at a hotel. His worrying is not confined to his finances; when he hears of Kay's engagement he convinces himself that Buckley is a criminal before eventually allowing himself to be satisfied that he is a perfectly respectable young man with good financial prospects. One thing that seems to cause him surprisingly little worry is his daughter's age; Kay is only twenty (and Elizabeth Taylor was only eighteen at the time), but nobody seems to suggest- as they doubtless would today- that it might be a good idea if she was to wait a few years before thinking of marriage. The world of 1950 was perhaps different to our own in this respect.
One-joke comedies can quickly outstay their welcome, but "Father of the Bride" is quite an enjoyable piece of light entertainment, largely because Spencer Tracy manages to make Stanley a loveable old grouch, for all his faults. This is, in fact, very much Tracy's film; he eclipses Buckley's parents, who play a relatively minor role, and Joan Bennett as the Mother of the Bride, Stanley's wife Ellie. (Tracy wanted his real-life partner Katharine Hepburn to play Ellie but the studio felt that audiences were too used to seeing Tracy and Hepburn in romantic comedies to accept them as a couple who have been married for over twenty years). He even manages to eclipse Taylor, who looks fantastic but never makes the film her own. Taylor was one of those stars who could impress herself so completely onto a role as to make it impossible to imagine any other actress playing it; here some other beautiful young starlet could have been cast as Kay and it would not have made a great difference.
I have not seen the recent remake with Andy Garcia and it is many years since I saw the 1991 version with Steve Martin, so I will not make comparisons. It says something about the original, however, that it could inspire sequels forty-one and seventy-two years after it first appeared. For that achievement Spencer Tracy must take most of the credit. 6/10.
The film is essentially a one-joke comedy, the joke being that Stanley is a both a tight-fisted old grumbler and a neurotic worrier. Although underneath all his grumbling and worrying he loves his daughter dearly, he spends virtually the whole film grumbling and worrying about the wedding, particularly about how much it is going to cost him, even though as a successful partner in a law firm his pockets are presumably much deeper than he pretends. He tries to cut down on the guest list, but has to give way to his wife who has set her heart on a particularly elaborate wedding, and insists on holding the reception at his home (which does not really seem large enough to accommodate 250 guests) rather than at a hotel. His worrying is not confined to his finances; when he hears of Kay's engagement he convinces himself that Buckley is a criminal before eventually allowing himself to be satisfied that he is a perfectly respectable young man with good financial prospects. One thing that seems to cause him surprisingly little worry is his daughter's age; Kay is only twenty (and Elizabeth Taylor was only eighteen at the time), but nobody seems to suggest- as they doubtless would today- that it might be a good idea if she was to wait a few years before thinking of marriage. The world of 1950 was perhaps different to our own in this respect.
One-joke comedies can quickly outstay their welcome, but "Father of the Bride" is quite an enjoyable piece of light entertainment, largely because Spencer Tracy manages to make Stanley a loveable old grouch, for all his faults. This is, in fact, very much Tracy's film; he eclipses Buckley's parents, who play a relatively minor role, and Joan Bennett as the Mother of the Bride, Stanley's wife Ellie. (Tracy wanted his real-life partner Katharine Hepburn to play Ellie but the studio felt that audiences were too used to seeing Tracy and Hepburn in romantic comedies to accept them as a couple who have been married for over twenty years). He even manages to eclipse Taylor, who looks fantastic but never makes the film her own. Taylor was one of those stars who could impress herself so completely onto a role as to make it impossible to imagine any other actress playing it; here some other beautiful young starlet could have been cast as Kay and it would not have made a great difference.
I have not seen the recent remake with Andy Garcia and it is many years since I saw the 1991 version with Steve Martin, so I will not make comparisons. It says something about the original, however, that it could inspire sequels forty-one and seventy-two years after it first appeared. For that achievement Spencer Tracy must take most of the credit. 6/10.