Director: Charles Shyer
Stanley T. Banks: Spencer Tracy
Ellie Banks: Joan Bennett
Kay Banks : Elizabeth Taylor
Buckley Dunstan: Don Taylor

Just for the record, there was apparently a 1961 FotB TV series. I haven't seen it, and I therefore can't review it. But I'm sure that it could never match this near-perfect gem of a movie. There. I hope that that makes those of you who didn't like my positive review of the remake of this movie feel a little better.

My mother has declared this the best of the wedding related movies, with the High Society/Philadelphia Story take on nuptual hijinks a close second. I'm sure that there are a lot of you who agree. I would go further to say that this movie stands out on its own. You can't compare it to any of the other wedding movies, to do so cheapens the whole experience.

I just noticed now, constructing this page, that the remake changed all the names of the characters. I wonder why that was necessary. Okay, "Stanley" is a little too old-fashioned. And "Buckley Dunstan" was a caricature of a name when it was invented. Which, of course, was the point. But I guess that it does have a kind of dusty fedora ring to it. Pity, though.

For me, the high point of watching this movie is when everyone is bustling around with the packages fromt he department store because Kay just bought her trousseau. Her father sits in a hall chair, reading the bills aloud, becoming more and more incensed at the unanticipated costs of this wedding. When the son appears in a new tuxedo, he boils over. I was watching this with my friend Wendy, and at this point she said "That's it! We're all going to the wedding NUDE! NAKED! And we're going to Denny's afterward for the reception!" I just know that Spencer meant to say this, and he conveyed it all with bushy eyebrows raised in alarm. That's what makes his performance brilliant. Wendy was able to get all that, the rage, the pathos, the exortation that all would eat at Denny's, just from his facial expression. Some point to the near-surreal "nightmare" scene as the climactic point of the movie. For me, it's that trousseau scene.

Yes, Liz is luminous. She can't help it. It just is, like Everest is. She has her best moment when she's throwing a fit about how her husband-to-be has decided on a fishing vacation in Nova Scotia as the perfect honeymoon. The rat. As if he didn't know that she had gone out and bought all ofthose new evening clothes and he wants to stick her out on some smelly fishing canoe in the middle of some algae-covered lake. I was almost so angry myself I could have picked a fight with David, purely out of solidarity. This contrasts in an interesting way with the parallel scene from the remake, where the Annie character is angry with her intended because he bought her a — horror of horrors — blender. Apparently she was willing to call the whole thing off because she perceived this as an anti-feminist statement. Now, normally, I'm rabidly enough feminist to get behind my sisters. But if we had to compare the two, Liz's slam-the-car-door-on-her-fiancee's-hand reaction to his sheer thoughtlessness beats Kim's he-doesn't-understand-me whining, no contest.

And I'm trying to get over the apparent age difference between Tracy and Bennett, my pet peeve about Hollywood, that it is pathologically incapable of casting "spouses" who are the same age. In a movie from the 50's, I'm more willing to accept an older looking husband than I am in a movie from the '90s. Not entirely willing, but more so.

Bottom line: Boy and girl meet and decide to marry, boy and girl marry, father gets bills and agita. But you knew that already. This movie is from before the days of Technicolor, but it will never be old. Unless you have no heart, you can't go wrong with this one.