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 This movie is "bright" and "entertaining" as well as "perfect in performance."
It is in technicolor and is set in New York in the 1880s. The film focuses on
the Day family and the reluctance of the father to be baptized. They claim
William Powell gives "one of the best performances of his career" and note that
Irene Dunne plays his wife who is described as "charming" and "illogical."
"The entire family will find pleasure in this warm, sentimental and comic
screen portrait." (From the Goodtimes Home Video release.) 1947, 118 minutes, VHS
William Powell is probably best known as Nick Charles, the husband half of the
married detectives featured in the Thin Man series of movies from the the
thirties and forties. He, along with his frequent co-star Myrna Loy brought a
playful sophisticated wit to the detective genre, something that William
Warren was an abject failure at in Satan Met A Lady (in spite of his efforts to
look like Powell). In this film, Powell finds himself in the role of Clarence
Day, a wealthy denizen of New York City in 1883. He lives in this really sweet
crib on Madison Avenue that you and I would never have access to in our lives
unless we were selected to appear on MTV's Real World (True stor-eeee!). Now
before we all started hating this guy for his phat lifestyle, you should
understand that he also has a family. He has a wife played by the always
underrated and quite talented Irene Dunne, who has her own history with
screwball and romantic comedies, most memorably with Cary Grant in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. Both Powell and Dunne give sweetly funny performances that elevate an
otherwise unremarkable puff piece about the perfect (yet slightly crazed!)
American family (If you want Hollywood's take on the status of the American
family as it is today, you should rent American Beauty. This movie should convince you that those people in Hollywood are a bunch of
pinkos who should start loving this great country or should start leaving it!
Kevin Spacey as a married father with children who lusts after an underage
cheerleader? Am I really supposed to believe that?) Clarence also has kids,
four sons to be exact ranging from about 18 to
around 5 or 6. The movie opens on a typical day in the Day household and it
finds them breaking in a new maid. This allows us to see exactly what a
character this Clarence Day is. And when they say "character" you or I would
probably say "mean jerk-face." You see, Clarence is lovable because he's
always screaming at the help, stomping his feet on the floor of the dining room
so that the cook downstairs will rush up to see what she's done wrong, and
generally being an all around jack-ass. The family is lovable and whacky in
other ways. For some reason, Clarence's wife calls him Claire and the wife's
name is Vinnie. I have no idea what that stands for, but everytime they
talked, I had this weird sensation that this was one of those weird pre-op sex
change couples where both are going to switch genders. I mean you got the man
calling the woman by a man's name (from Welcome Back, Kotter no less) and a woman calling a man by a woman's name. What kind of morals did
they have in the 1880s?  There really isn't much of a plot to speak of in this film. It sort of
meanders to and fro, with differing story elements coming and going. One of
the kids is learning his catechism, another one is trying to get into Elizabeth
Taylor's pants, and another one is involved with inventing things and being an
entrepreneur. The thread that consistently runs throughout the movie is
Clarence's refusal to be baptized. That comes out a little later in the movie
and I have some ground to cover before we get there. After breakfast in the
opening segment in the movie, we are treated to Claire's ramblings about the
politicians of the day. Apparently even back in the 1880s they had trouble
with those slimy bastards, so it was quite entertaining to hear him hoot and
holler about his elected officials doing silly-assed stuff like porking and
greasing interns. Good times. Good times. When Claire gets into one of his
tirades, he doesn't stop for anything, continuing to talk and gesture like the
object of his scorn is in the room with him, even if it is just his kid or the
new maid or someone. This results in him pointing at the maid and saying
something like, "I'm going to have you thrown in jail for killing Chandra
Levy!" The maid, who doesn't watch the Fox News Channel and as such has no
idea who Levy is, freaks out and falls backward down the stairs, breaking a
bunch of dishes. One thing I've learned from watching these old movies is that
servants do a heck of a lot of pratfalls. I would have never guessed that.
Now, it so happens that Cousin Cora is coming to visit the Day house. This is
good news and bad news. The good news is that Claire doesn't know she and her
little friend, Elizabeth Taylor, are spending the week at his house. The bad
news is that he soon finds out they are spending the week at his house.
Claire, like most real he-men is outraged that some complete stranger, like his
cousin, is going to be staying at house, screwing up the order of things. You
see,
Claire, is what my counselor calls an "OCD freak" (and I'm paraphrasing) meaning
he's a real pain to be around. He frequently tells his wife, Vinnie Barbarino
(her maiden name, I'm guessing) that the household should be run like a
business and that the household accounts always need to be in order. He has to
know where his money is going and there's an extended scene regarding the
purchase of a new coffee pot and how much it will cost and how it got broken
(Claire threw it on the ground in a fit of pique). It's funny because it's so
minor and he's so deadly serious about it all, but if you had to live with this
guy in real life, your kids' names would most likely end up being Lyle and Erik,
and they would probably play a lot Doom when they weren't going to school at
Columbine.  Well, eventually Cousin Cora and Liz Taylor roll into town and the eldest son,
who apparently has never seen a woman before, goes all ga ga over the vapid
Liz. I mean, don't get wrong, she's okay looking, but I don't think she even
had a brain stem, let alone the capability to carry on an intelligent
conversation. When she talks, she squeals and when she mentions that she might
go to college, you immediately have her degree of choice pegged as the MRS.
Maybe
that's how women were at the time. After all, it was 1883 and electricity
wasn't even a common occurrence let alone a subscription to Ms. Magazine. Oh, just in case you hadn't guessed, Claire's opposed to electricity. So
Claire, Jr. and Liz are kind of sweet on each other and blather on about duets
and she plays the piano and he tries to play the violin and then it comes out
that she's (gasp!) a Methodist. The Day family is something called
Episcopalian which I'm assuming is somewhere in southern Europe. Well, later
at dinner, it comes out that Claire, Sr. was never baptized, which causes a
whole truckload of stress for Vinnie who assumes that this means that they
can't be in heaven together. Do married people really have conversations like
this? Aren't they usually doing whatever they can to avoid even looking at
one another, let alone having great philosophical debates? Now, I will admit
to having heard my mamma and daddy talking about religion and stuff, but
usually they would just discuss exactly which one was going to hell, and how
they could get there. I mean, is it possible to love someone and
simultaneously think they're going to suffer eternal damnation? Sounds like its
time for a new religion to me. So, Vinnie gets all hyper about hubby taking it
in the butt from the Lord of the Flies hisself and that becomes the issue that
permeates the rest of the movie. I don't think I'm shocking any of you by
letting on that eventually Claire gives in and just lets the old bag have her
way so she can start yapping and moaning about something else. If it's any
consolation, he makes her take this god-awful ugly-assed statue of a pug dog
back
to the store where she bought it. Of course, she someone manages to purchase a
new Liz-friendly suit of clothes for Claire, Jr with the refund. Confound it,
those funds were supposed to be returned to the household accounts! Can't tell
you how many times the old lady's done that same damn thing to me at Wal-Mart,
usually involving the wrong kind of beer (read my lips: Keystone!). The rest of the movie is taken up with the storyline of Vinnie becoming deathly
ill. This is where we see that for all his blustering and carrying on, that
Claire loves his wife dearly. He rushes home from work, taking a cab (that's
mucho expensive!) and then paces around the house demanding to know how the
doctor is going fix everything. He even waters this rubber plant that Vinnie
loves and that he thinks is a monstrosity. Eventually, he makes one of those
deals with Vinnie and God that we all make when we're in a desperate situation
like maybe getting our girlfriend preggers or maybe trying not to have our
probation revoked. You know the one: I'll do anything if you just get me out
of this! Get well Vinnie, I'll promise I'll get baptized! Well, she does get
well and Claire shows us what he's made of when he immediately reneges on the
deal. Vinnie is not about to be stopped and makes plans for Claire to get
baptized in some out of the way church way up in the north part of NYC (even
above Harlem!) figuring that if she's going to ask Claire to do the job in the
whole baptism angle that she should probably arrange it so Claire doesn't have
to put her over in front of his home crowd. But what about her mysterious
illness? What's the deal with that? Well, you know that new super-dooper
medicine that cures all that ails you and sells for a buck a bottle? You know,
that stuff that the two older Day children have been peddling all over town?
Come on! It's the stuff that killed the neighbor's dog! Riiiight! So, they
secretly gave mama a dose of it so that she could "get well." Thanks Lyle and
Erik (again with the L & E reset!). Claire is somewhat perturbed by that turn
of events and tells one of the kids that he's going to have to refund the money
out of their allowance to everyone that bought that swill. Well, refunds to
those that survived drinking little Jimmy Jones' kool-aid. The inventor kid
(electric battery, burglar alarm, hookah) complains that he won't get an
allowance until he's 21. Ahh, out of the mouth of babes!  The movie ends with everyone heading off to that out of the way church that
specializes in baptizing middle-age dudes whose wives have them p-whipped (hey
it's good work if you can it). Cousin Cora and Liz Taylor also make a
reappearance at the end to liven things up and to play up that whole young love
thing Liz and Claire, Jr. were messing around with. Neither of them are very
convincing, except that you were convinced that Claire, Jr. was an even bigger
nerd than his dad and that Liz Taylor would continue to get work in spite of
her acting prowess. This film is what the professionals would call a "slice of
Americana." What that translates to for those of us that get our news from the Fox and Friends morning show and our weather from the pre-game forecast on the NFL on Fox (should be excellent weather for tailgating!) is that this is some
goody-goody's
version of an all-white, wealthy, America that only exists in the minds of old
farts who can't wait for Touched By An Angel to come on. Watching this movie, you would think that living in 1883 was like
living in a utopia. Why, even when something bad happened, like Vinnie trying
to croak, it turned out to be brought on by a couple of rascals and their crazy
attempts at starting a business (she's so sick, but aren't they precious?). I
really can't stand these movies that attempt to sell me a bill of goods that
there was anything such as the good old days. These people didn't have real
problems (they can't keep a maid, the dad isn't baptized, their son is ga-ga
over Liz Taylor) and it kind of grates on you to see them act like they have
them. That being said, I suppose you can't really hate a movie cause it ain't
as orney as a junkyard dog. In fact, it is entertaining if you take it for
what it was (a postwar-feel-good-about-being-an-American movie - all that
sacrifice was worth it!) and enjoy the warm fuzzy Norman Rockwell version of an
American family that lots of people probably secretly wish they had. Me? I'm
fine with my lesbian aunt, no-account dad, and my alcoholic uncle. My cousin
also used to wet the bed when he was almost in Jr. High, but I haven't seen him
in years and ain't about to invite him to my trailer to find out if he had that
problem fixed. The performances of Powell and Dunne will win over the cynics
in the crowd, because even though they live in this artificially sweet version
of America, you can see in their interactions that these are two characters who
have a genuine affection for one another. You believe that she is worried he
won't be there in the afterlife with her and you know that he would be lost
without her in this world. I think that in spite of the bogusness of much of
what transpires, the relationship the two have is one worth experiencing as a
viewer and it's through that relationship that this movie retains its
connection with the modern viewer. Regardless of what goes on in our world,
you can still identify with the depth of feeling the two have for one another,
in
spite of their differences. You can watch them and say, that no matter how
much the world changes, the love they have for each other and their family is
still a message that resonates. Well, that and he hates it when
relatives come over. I think that resonates with a lot of us as well. Hey
Cousin Kevin is here! Bust out the plastic sheets!
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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