BEFORE: Another Bette Davis film - I've unconsciously put 4 of her films in chronological order, so it's like I'm watching her age a little more toward old lady-ness every night. TCM was running this in a Borgnine marathon along with "Marty", and when I realized that I didn't have a copy of "Marty" (but had watched it in film school) this one came along for the ride - two movies per DVD whenever possible, to save space.
THE PLOT: At breakfast, Jane announces that she and Ralph are getting married the next week. All Jane and Ralph want is a small wedding with the immediate family and no reception. However, at dinner that night all Ralph's parents talk about are the big weddings they gave their daughters and everything escalates.
AFTER: Another look at love and marriage in the past - though I've moved up to 1956 now, and this one comes with a pedigree, it's a Paddy Chayefsky story, and Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay. There's a delineation between the classes here, as a woman from a lower-class family gets engaged to a man from an upper-class family. But traditionally the bride's family is supposed to pay for the wedding, so what's going to happen?
The bride's father is a NYC cab driver who's just about to get the chance to buy a retiring cabbie's medallion. Without the medallion, he's forced to take shifts in other driver's cabs, like working the less-desired night shifts. But with his own cab, he can work daylight hours and rent out his cab to others at night. I think the NYC cab system still works this way, oddly enough. I guess that's not too surprising, so many of New York's systems seem antiquated - it feels sometimes like the city works the way it works only because everyone thinks that's the only way it can work.
He and his wife live in a cramped apartment with their adult son and daughter, along with the wife's brother, who sleeps on a day bed. This is another sign of the times, children often lived with their parents until they were married, whereas today they're likely to get their own apartments, and then after a setback or two move back in with their parents anyway. But hey, at least they tried.
The intended bride and groom don't want a lot of fuss, just a quick ceremony with a priest and then an extended honeymoon out west, on a trip where they're delivering a friend's car. But a feeling of financial inadequacy, coupled with the mother's belief that her daughter secretly wants a big catered affair (coupled with the fact that she herself never got one, and always regretted it) leads to plans for a large event with costs spiraling out of control.
Still, it's funny to hear people talk about a wedding costing hundreds of dollars, and thinking that's extravagant. Sure, those are 1956 dollars - I never really understood why the dollars of the past seemed to be worth more, did prices just keep going up because everyone is greedy, or did our currency just get devalued somehow over time? But anyway, a few hundred dollars was a big deal back then - today a wedding can run thousands of dollars just for starters.
The class struggle makes this all seem pretty clichéd, plus there's everything one might expect in a typical wedding story - the speed of the wedding forcing gossip about the young girl being pregnant, the inability of the matron of honor to afford her gown, invitation mix-ups, etc. Watch any modern comedy about weddings and you'll probably see a lot of the same material covered. Still, the conflicts feel real, and it's a mostly entertaining comic story with a sweet ending where love wins out.
Also starring Ernest Borgnine (last seen in "RED"), Debbie Reynolds (last seen in "Postcards From the Edge"), Barry Fitzgerald (last seen in "The Shame of Mary Boyle"), Rod Taylor (last seen in "The Birds"), Robert F. Simon, Madge Kennedy.
RATING: 6 out of 10 canasta hands
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