Life with Father (1947)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Movie very well represent extremist time, time of religion. Just awful time. I'll show this movie to my children, to show them how was time of extreme religion when people didn't think with their head.

William Powell as Wall Street broker Clarence Day, a devout Republican, penny-pincher, and eternally-fussy family man in 1880s New York. He's an insufferable prig, the kind of man who refuses to kneel at church and makes maids cry. His lashing out at everyone is supposed to blustery and charming--holding up a 'mirror' to the audience so that we can see what funny fools we all are. This would acceptable if Powell's performance were indeed a hoot but, instead, his Clarence Day is a lead-weight: Ebenezer Scrooge without the benefit of Christmas. Donald Ogden Stewart's screenplay (adapted from the insanely long-running Broadway hit by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, from Day's memoir), is full of big entrances, punched-up laugh lines, and broad exposition. One gets the feeling that Ogden Stewart grew up in the theater and remained there throughout his adulthood. The picture has handsome color, and the casting benefit of a girlish Elizabeth Taylor as a love-interest for Powell's eldest son (whose voice cracks like a 12-year-old's, though the actor portraying him is at least 20). As for Powell, his nasty disposition is finally (and predictably) sentimentalized, as if the ultimate purpose of this piece was simply to melt our hearts. Bah! ** from ****

I have been a tremendous fan of this movie for many years. I discovered the movie version after I had seen a local stage production and it was an excellent transfer of the play to the screen. Until recently I had only seen it on TV first in black and white years ago and then in color on TCM. I like it so well I bought two of the DVD versions (I won't mention which) and as other reviewers have said they were horrible with washed out color, grainy images and sound that was not synchronized and barely understandable. I guess this is all you can reasonably expect for a movie that has some how slipped into the public domain and for which there is not much demand. However, while searching on Amazon I discovered a review for a new digitally remastered DVD that supposedly fixed all those problems. I ordered a copy and the review was correct. There is now an excellent DVD available from DigiComTV BarCode # 885444062681.

In his third and final Oscar nomination, William Powell was nominated for playing the bellowing and lovable 19th century domestic tyrant Clarence Day, Sr. in Life With Father. If he had to lose I'm sure Powell was glad it was to his very good friend in real life Ronald Colman for A Double Life. Still with that strange flaming red hair on top of his familiar features, Powell imprints his own personality on the leading role of the longest running play on Broadway up to that time.Based on the recollections of Clarence Day, Jr. as played by Jimmy Lydon here, Life With Father ran for eight years on Broadway for 3447 performances. It was brought to the stage by Howard Lindsay and his two partners, writing partner Russell Crouse who adapted Day's work to the stage and life partner Dorothy Stickney who with her husband got their career roles on Broadway. The play ran from 1939 through 1947 taking America right through World War II. The time that it was written and presented to the public may account for its popularity as the public might just have wanted reassurance of American values at that critical point.As Lindsay and Stickney had no kind of movie box office, Warner Brothers decided to acquire William Powell for the lead and cast Irene Dunne as the wise mother who has learned just the right way to handle her husband and inevitably get what she wants. Powell is a man who thinks when all else has failed, he can bellow his way through any situation. My favorite line in the play is when he tries to hire a maid and that title quote is when he's asked for references.Warner paid a lot in loan outs for this film. Irene Dunne was not a contract employee of his studio and Elizabeth Taylor was also borrowed from MGM for the small, decorative part of a cousin that gets Jimmy Lydon and Martin Milner's hormones in an uproar. The part that Taylor plays was originated on Broadway by another future film star, Teresa Wright.Incidentally Martin Milner reminisced many years later about the film and said of all the boys and of course Powell, he was the only natural redhead among the lot.Edmund Gwenn fresh from an Oscar himself for Miracle on 34th Street plays the Episcopalian minister who is trying to get a large contribution from Powell for a new church. Their discussion is also a highlight of the play and the fact that Powell had never been baptized is also a subject of a lot of humor.Father still had life well into the Fifties with a television series adapted from the play that starred Leon Ames as dear old dad.The play, the film still have a lot of character in it.