Category: Rapid Response

Rapid Response: La Grande Illusion

Jean Renoir reminds me of the Robert Altman of the ’30s. His films have rich casts, authentic dialogue and concern society, class and order in different communities and settings. In “La Grande Illusion,” or the mistranslated English title “Grand Illusion” (it should be “The Great Illusion”), Renoir finds culture in of all places a World War I POW camp in Germany. Released just as tensions were getting high in Europe again, Renoir called it the last war of gentlemen.

As the movie starts, the Germans have shot down the French planes of Lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin) and Captain Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay). “If they’re officers, invite them for lunch,” the Germans say. They sit and small talk, and for a moment you forget that their meal together came as the result of violence, death and being prisoners.

Perhaps also like “M.A.S.H.,” “La Grande Illusion” is a loose comedy, operating on pleasant banter, clever conversation and observations, peculiar situations and above all social customs.

Part of the movie’s feel has to do with the fact that there almost always seem to be about a half dozen people on screen at once. Renoir uses economical, understated cinematography to survey the room and surprise us when one character deserves our attention. It’s the little details we pick up that paint a picture of how bad this war is, like when one guy confesses that being a vegetarian and being in the war didn’t stop his wife from cheating on him, or when one soldier puts on women’s clothes and a wig and all the soldiers in the room stop dead in their tracks for a moment because they haven’t seen a woman in so long.

Both Marechal and Boeldieu lead escape attempts in the two POW camps they’re trapped in for seemingly no reason at all other than because it is necessary. If they do leave these fairly comfy confines, they’ll only have to go back to fight in what feels like an endless war, but prison camps are there to be broken out of. To not even try would be like betraying a social order.

What’s beautiful about the film is how utterly noble it is. The film has aged well over time because Renoir seems to predict in the film that royalty and class systems as they knew them in the time of the first World War will be obsolete from the world. The movie mentions that cancer and gout aren’t working class diseases yet, but they will be, and we realize how deep the societal structures once were. We see the enemy camp leader, Captain von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim), showing genuine mercy as Boeldieu attempts to escape. We see Marechal learning his social skills outside of prison walls in a short sequence near the end that provides the film its heart. And for a film about war, it is free of virtually any violence, vicious acts or major tragedies, and yet it has great power.

Rapid Response: Life is Beautiful

If one of Woody Allen’s characters were required to give a speech explaining why a room of Italians were the dominant race, he’d be sarcastic, make a fool of himself and be embarrassed in the process. Ask Roberto Benigni’s Guido in “Life is Beautiful,” he’ll make a fool of himself too, but he’ll jump on the table and boldly say how beautiful his belly button is before climbing out the window.

To me, “Life is Beautiful” works because of the film’s opening love story. Benigni presents Guido as a loveable and goofy clown in scenes that Chaplin or Groucho would’ve adored. The beginning is a dopey, screwball comedy fairy tale where the hero has the boisterously loud and fast talking Italian voice but none of the angry shouting. At times he employs broad slapstick when he crashes into the lovely principessa Dora on a bike or steals a poor schmuck’s hat. At others it’s hammy wordplay, like when Guido gets a rich Italian diplomat to order an already prepared salmon, salad and white wine by telling him the only other available options are the very, very fried mushrooms. And at times he puts sheer magic into his movie, convincing Dora he can be granted miracles by the Virgin Mary.

But anyone who has heard of this movie will know it becomes something very different. Years after Guido marries Dora and has a son, they’re hauled off to a concentration camp during the war. Guido convinces his son that their whole stay is part of a game to win a real tank, explaining that if he hides and stays quiet in front of the mean guards, he’ll earn enough points to win one.

Benigni is treading very dangerous ground in trying to be optimistic and funny in the face of the worst human tragedy of all time. If the film were any less sincere about its intentions, I’d likely hate it, but Benigni commits to never letting his act in front of his kid feel fake or phony. He’s a Marx Brother in duress, always one step ahead of a bad situation.

“Life is Beautiful” was greeted by the American public in a wave of good cheer in 1998. The film was nominated for Best Picture and won two Oscars for Benigni for Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film. Already Benigni had been known as the “funniest man in Italy,” but some of his early American appearances, both on Letterman and in Jim Jarmusch films, confounded at best. By the time this film came out, Benigni was adored. “Life is Beautiful” made a hefty $57 million at the box office, and his acceptance speech at the Oscars has become a thing of legend. People called out “Roberto” as Sophia Loren prepared to read the winner, and when it was so he stood on the chair in front of him and began bowing to and kissing everyone in sight.

It was greeted so favorably that it blocked out the small, but very vocal dissenters who have been able to make their voices heard much more clearly as the film has aged. Their opinion that the conceit of the movie itself is sickening is a valid point. The Holocaust isn’t exactly the butt of the joke in “Life is Beautiful,” but in staying optimistic it white washes just how horrible things were. Should we really be given hope or solace for our lost loved ones based on this one family’s fairy tale survival?

I don’t necessarily feel the same way about the film, but it is definitely something worth understanding.

Rapid Response: Bananas

Most great artists need a few films to come into form. One of the great examples is the extremely prolific Woody Allen, whose early films like “Sleeper” and “Love and Death” were leaps and bounds goofier than “Annie Hall” and his later masterpieces.

But then even before those was “Bananas.” The immediate difference is the lack of the classic Allen typeface, Windsor, to open the credits of the film. These big bubble letters alone show a more animated, musical film than the sophisticated wordplay of the later ones. Allen actually proves himself to be a very gifted slapstick comic here, but he’s definitely not at home quite yet, and “Bananas” lacks some of his other films’ narrative elegance.

Allen plays an unhappy product tester who one day starts dating a political activist (Louise Lasser, one of Allen’s wives) going door to door for petition signatures. Unlike in “Annie Hall,” Allen is not the smartest person in the relationship. In fact, he’s a putz, and she breaks up with him claiming that he could never be a daring leader.

But prior to them breaking up, he booked tickets to a fake Latin American nation currently in a state of political upheaval. The government plans to murder Allen and blame the rebels, but he’s rescued by the rebels and lives with them until the dictator is overthrown. When the new leader proves to be mad with power as well, Allen himself steps in as the dictator of the nation, donning a fake beard and military garb. Hilarity ensues.

Most of this is pretty dumb. Gags like a harp player actually being in the closet when the emotional music kicks in is an old hat bit that someone like Mel Brooks did a lot better at around the same time. There’s also the joke where the clerk yells in front of an embarrassed Allen buying a porn magazine, “What’s the price of Orgasm?”

But then there’s the opening scene, which is as daring as anything Allen’s ever done. He gets Howard Kossel to provide play-by-play commentary for the assassination of the Latin nation’s current president, asking him questions like “How do you feel,” just as he’s at his last breath. Movies today aren’t this knowingly cartoonish and cynically upfront about death and the media.

If nothing else, we can see some great style and bravura in all of Allen’s dopey gags. His movies always looked like art house productions, with careful framing in the Academy aspect ratio and not like sketch comedy routines in a Mel Brooks movie. This is not a great film of his, but it arguably has more innovative flair than movies he’s made in the last 20 years.

Rapid Response: Cape Fear (1991)

Sometimes you wonder when you’re watching “Cape Fear” if Martin Scorsese was making a remake of the 1962 horror movie or of “Vertigo.”

He’s got the Saul Bass title sequence, the Elmer Bernstein score channeling Bernard Hermann, Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum in minor cameos, stark fades into solid colors and a film that is intentionally pitched at a level of sheer insanity.

“Cape Fear” was not well received by critics upon its release. It was seen as yet another genre picture by a director capable of so much more, least of all immediately after the masterpiece that was “Goodfellas” a year prior. But it has a lot more style and personality from Scorsese than “The Color of Money” did, because Scorsese isn’t just looking to make a genre picture but a film with dark characters, heavy themes, strong cinematic references, big ideas and even bigger performances.

Robert De Niro is so effing brilliant as the sadistic ex-con Max Cady. It hearkens back to a time when De Niro actually, you know, acted. In terrorizing Nick Nolte and his family, he has this calming, charming, attractive eloquence that puts the rest of the family’s neurotic insanity into perspective. He pulls a lot from Robert Mitchum’s playbook for his performances in both the original “Cape Fear” and “The Night of the Hunter,” but he makes the character his own. He displays charismatic insanity and proves to be capable of surprising violence and intensity.

So thanks to his performance, Scorsese is able to go ape shit. Nolte, Jessica Lange and a young Juliette Lewis are all flawed, weak members of their own dysfunctional family, but ultimately they’re fairly thin, capable of going crazy with just a little prodding. Scorsese has them and us jumping at just the sound of a phone ringing, jolting the camera towards it and blaring its ringing aggressively. Later, Scorsese turns our world upside down and dangles us by a thread, with the camera in a close up of De Niro hanging from a pull up bar, his hair flailing wildly like the Joker in “The Dark Knight.”

This Max Cady character, what with his clever ability to never cross into territory of breaking the law, always finding ways to get one step ahead of Nolte and nitpick at his mind, the bible warnings printed all over his body and finally his superhuman strength against thugs and lighter fluid, he strikes me as more of an allegory about insanity than an actual person. But the sheer madness of the film’s final moments as Cady continues fighting and screaming against all odds even goes beyond the stretches of what could possibly be considered allegorical.

“Cape Fear” is possibly more exaggerated and intense than even something like “Shutter Island,” another Scorsese that veered from his comfort zone into the realm of madness. But it resonated with audiences as the 12th highest grossing movie of 1991 and earned De Niro his most recent Oscar nomination for Best Actor. It’s by far not the finest work from Scorsese but so indicative of how versatile an artist he has become in the modern day.

Rapid Response: Louisiana Story

Two oil workers in Robert Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story” are standing on the rig looking out over a river in a deep south bayou. A boy slowly approaches in a small canoe, and when he gets within viewing distance holds up a monstrous catfish he claims to have caught all on his own.

“What kind of bait did you use to catch such a big catfish,” the riggers call out.

“It’s not the bait.”

Flaherty’s docudrama about the Louisiana bayou succeeds because it is an idyllic slice of life using real residents instead of professional actors and on-location settings that gives the whole film a documentary realistic quality. At only 78 minutes long and without much dialogue to support a real story, it really isn’t the bait.

It’s the story of a boy living in the bayou whose life changes when an oil company raises a massive rig to drill in the river that surrounds their home. We see the boy hunting and exploring in the swamp and becoming fascinated both by the world’s natural beauty and the other-worldly sounds and imagery of the oil rig.

Flaherty has in modern times come to be known as the father of documentaries thanks to his film “Nanook of the North,” and “Louisiana Story,” his last film, has been mistaken as such. But the scenarios themselves are constructed and fictional, only attaining authenticity with Flaherty’s often startling style.

Throughout much of the film set in the swamplands, Flaherty removes any and all natural sound and allows the images to speak for themselves in a virtual silent film. So we’re riveted purely by the sights of a crocodile slowly stalking a crane and then seeing it again later with a bird leg sticking out of its mouth or by the quick edits and the aggressive thrashing captured when the boy sets a trap for the crocodile and fights it in revenge for eating his pet raccoon Jojo.

And yet this approach is the exact opposite when Flaherty takes us onto the oil rig. No score accompanies the deafening roar of chains flying or gears moving in workman like precision. Critics have complained that because “Louisiana Story” was commissioned by Standard Oil that the film is not as hard on the effects of oil drilling as it could be (despite that the environment would hardly be a topic of concern in 1948), but the film’s noticeable difference in tone is somehow unsettling from the otherwise peaceful imagery of the swamp.

We see in this film a boy who, although he goes looking for trouble by fighting crocodiles and climbing dangerous oil rigs, is really just trying to do good. The film’s morality and fascination with the real world make “Louisiana Story” an engaging slice of life.

Rapid Response: Burden of Dreams

More than one person confused Les Blank’s documentary “Burden of Dreams” as a film Werner Herzog actually made himself when I saw Herzog at the IU Cinema. It’s a bleak documentary about being stuck and blindly continuing in the pursuit of dreams until everything sinks into madness.

Except Herzog did make this film, only his is called “Fitzcarraldo.”

“Burden of Dreams” is the enthralling document of one of the most legendary film productions in cinema history. “Fitzcarraldo’s” only rival in this sense, and “Burden of Dreams'” only comparable rival, are “Apocalypse Now” and the documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.” Yet unlike “Hearts of Darkness,” a film made years later and one that aims for the same feeling of madness as its source material, Les Blank’s film was released the same year and is a literal, fact based illustration of impossibility. Yes Herzog got his film made, and it even ends on a bittersweet, happy note, but “Burden of Dreams” treats this idea as an after thought. The struggle and the lasting impression left by surviving this ordeal is still there.

Time and again during his week in Indiana, Herzog referred to nature as a cruel, obscene place where poetry exists, but not in the Disney-fied version most people imagine. Here he says to the camera, “The trees here are in misery. The birds are in misery. They don’t sing; they just screech in pain. If there is a God, he created this place out of anger. Its only harmony is that of collective murder.”

His love-hate relationship with the jungle seems to start right here, and we have it all on tape. Wouldn’t it be funny if before this he was actually a charming, sunny guy?

Herzog himself called “Fitzcarraldo” one of the best documentaries he ever made. It’s the story of a man, Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald (Klaus Kinski), with a dream to bring opera to the South American jungle by opening his own opera house. His get rich quick scheme involves dragging a boat over a mountain to a parallel river on the opposite side, only for his plan to end in failure after successfully completing that impossible task.

Because Herzog wanted to shoot in the jungle and use a real boat, production on “Fitzcarraldo” had quite literally the same logistical problems amidst so many more. The film describes that the native American extras he paid only $3.50 a day, twice their daily rate, believed rumors that Herzog was planning on raping and murdering their entire civilization. Activists showed the natives Holocaust photos and told them Herzog was responsible for this genocide on his previous film. This coupled with a civil war in the territory he was shooting, forced Herzog to move to an even more remote location, hundreds of miles away from the nearest town.

Blank’s way of illustrating this is poignant and elegant. Rather than use a map or narration, he has Herzog standing alone in the dense jungle. He points one way and says it’s a couple hundred miles until the forest ends. He points in another direction and says the same. He turns yet another 90 degrees and says its even more. The final direction he points in is the shortest, only a hundred miles. But they are really in the middle of nowhere.

Herzog demands the most of his production in the worst conditions. He needs three boats, one to film on one river, one to drag over the mountain, and one to film on the second river, potentially destroying it on rapids. His engineers and DPs know how futile this all is, his actors Klaus Kinski feel trapped, and his extras feel their lives are in danger.

The subtlety of Blank’s film however is that Herzog is never fully portrayed as a madman. His plans seem outrageous on paper or when spoken by the narrator, but he knows his actions will be disastrous no matter what he does, so all he can do is try to lessen the blow. We’re treated to lovely Herzog quotes about preserving native American life (“I don’t want to live in a world without lions”) and of pursuing dreams (“Life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.”), and although we question the brutal nature of filmmaking, only Herzog seems capable of rationalizing its artistic merits.

Blank creates feelings of dread and fleeting optimism through the smallest of details. We see Herzog wading in knee deep mud, and we know he’s literally and figuratively in deep. The news that people don’t even have a soccer ball seems even worse that their lives are in danger. But at least he can get prostitutes on his set or can find a way to keep the beer cold.

The Criterion Collection DVD of “Burden of Dreams” is also paired with another Les Blank documentary short about Herzog, the hilarious “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe,” a documentary about how Herzog stood in front of an audience, cooked and ate parts of his shoe after losing a bet to Errol Morris that he would never make his film “Gates of Heaven.” This film is a terrific little gem of directorial history, one that encourages people to find the motivation and guts to make movies, even if it means making a clown of yourself for your art.

“We should be foolish enough to do things like that,” Herzog says. He also says soundbytes like “I’m quite convinced cooking is the only alternative to filmmaking,” “A grown man like me should not go a week without cooking a meal,” and “We forgot the salt!”

Rapid Response: Seven Years Bad Luck

Roger Ebert has a trivia question to test if you are worthy of telling him a piece of movie trivia: “Who was the third great silent clown?” The correct answer is Harold Lloyd, he following both Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

But there’s a fourth. Maybe he’s not a “great” silent clown, but he was an important and famous figure in his time, France’s Max Linder.

I first heard Max Linder’s name thanks to Quentin Tarantino and “Inglourious Basterds.” If you haven’t seen a film of his, it’s not your fault. Of hundreds of shorts and a handful of features, not even a hundred survive and practically a dozen are even available for viewing. He came from a French vaudeville background and began acting in 1905, actually predating Chaplin and earning him the title of “The Professor” by Chaplin himself. He never achieved fame in America, but otherwise he was a global star. World War I and illnesses hampered his career, and he killed himself in a suicide pact with his wife in 1925, never knowing the pain of irrelevancy after the silent era.

Now one of his most well known films is “Seven Years Bad Luck,” where he plays a man trying to avoid bad luck after he shatters a mirror, only finding bad luck in the process.

If Chaplin was a lovable and innocent tramp, Keaton was a stone faced clown and Lloyd was a headstrong everyman, then Linder must have been the movie star of the bunch.

Linder’s character was a sociable, wealthy gentleman aptly named Max, and Linder himself was way better looking than the lot of his silent companions. He has a look that makes him resemble a grizzled Clark Gable or even Johnny Depp at times. He looks the part, whereas Chaplin and Keaton were flawless aliens and Lloyd was just lucky to be there.

But what’s more, Linder often plays the straight man in all of his gags. Rather than perform stunts and prat falls, Linder is just unassuming and unlucky. He gets in trouble with his girlfriend when he transforms her living room into a surreptitious dance hall for her servants, blindly plunking away at the piano with his back turned not realizing how much trouble he’s about to get into.

He’s an exuberant and natural presence, and if he’s not as physically talented as his silent clown peers, he can arrange the camera in such a way that the payoff is the same. In one scene, Max (a fairly short guy) hides behind a burly giant to sneak onto a train, walking carefully in his stride and giving the audience a perspective that prevents us from seeing him as well. Another director would just have its audience assume the train conductor couldn’t tell where he was hiding.

Linder also recycles gags from his vaudeville roots, but he imbues his own unique style and punchline into each one. The famous example from this film is an opening mirror gag. Most will recognize it as strikingly similar to the routine performed by the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.” One man pretends to be the other man’s reflection in a broken stand-up mirror, and the other suspiciously tries to test if he’s actually seeing himself. Something like this could only end one way, but Linder makes it special. He starts to shave in front of the mirror and lather himself with shaving cream. His reflection doesn’t have any cream in the jar beside him, so Linder assumes that, like his reflection, there’s nothing on his brush.

Another age old gag sees Linder get glue on his hand and be unable to let go of anything he touches. Hats, paper, doorknobs. These are all the usual beats such a gag can go through, but perhaps only a director from overseas would be bold enough to make it risque in the way Linder does, latching his hand onto a woman’s blouse until her entire dress pulls off as she tries to escape.

No one trying to get into silent comedy should start here. Linder does not have the pathos of Chaplin or the stunts of Keaton, but he does display roots that reveal how influential and enjoyable he once was.

Rapid Response: A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)

One of the best shots in “A Matter of Life and Death” is a deep focus image of Peter Carter (David Niven) sleeping in a chair while through a window we can clearly see his girlfriend June (Kim Hunter) and his doctor Frank Reeves (Roger Livesay) playing an innocent game of table tennis. The shot has a visual poetry and at once takes place in two distinct worlds.

Such is the nature of “A Matter of Life and Death,” a deep, profound, intelligent and thought provoking film on fate vs. free will that, unlike many films with similar themes, is blissfully playful and fun.

On the new critics’ Sight and Sound Poll, “A Matter of Life and Death” is tied for 90th place, the highest of any Powell and Pressburger film and just ahead of a movie with a similar subject but a very different tone, “The Seventh Seal.”

We meet Peter Carter mid-air on a crashing bomber plane during World War II, and just before he jumps out of the burning plane with no parachute, he spends his last few minutes talking to the on-the-ground operative June, quickly showing himself to be a man with poetry and love in his heart to a woman who can’t help but show compassion and concern.

The film switches to black and white, and we’re in a pristine, geometrically perfect place we quickly realize is heaven. Soldiers come up an escalator with expressions of insouciance as they explain their death, forlornness as one plays a harmonica coming up the stairs, confusion as one soldier searches this place aimlessly, and excitement as a flock of soldiers run upstairs together and start flirting with the angel secretary. It turns out that Peter was supposed to show up here, but his grim reaper, a French fop who blames the silly English weather and fog, caused him to miss. (“Sorry. I… lost my head”) But now that he’s fallen in love with June and has survived, he feels entitled to keep a hold of his life and appeals to the high court of heaven that love should supersede the law of death.

It’s a wonderful story that works like a charm, and its made all the more delightful by its vibrant visual palette. The Technicolor in Powell and Pressburger movies (see: “The Red Shoes”) always seems to pop more than even most films today, and here the look is used to depict Heaven as the sterile, ordered universe and Earth as the otherworldly place of love, magic and possibility. “One is starved for Technicolor up there,” says the grim reaper in a gem of a fourth wall breaking moment. Continue reading “Rapid Response: A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven)”

Rapid Response: Five Easy Pieces

“Five Easy Pieces” is one of the finest slices of Americana known to the movies. It plays more like passionate vignettes of a frustrated, disgruntled and misguided working class society.

It’s most tortured figure is Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson in an Oscar nominated performance, but that goes with the territory I suppose), a former concert pianist who has abandoned his wealthy life to work on an oil rig. When we meet him, the camera has dirt lifted out of our eyes. The film’s abrupt editing and sound mixing emphasize that Robert really doesn’t know how he even got here or why he’s living this life. Maybe both he and his friend Elton (Billy Green Bush) think they deserve something better, but then even Elton isn’t good enough for the one he’s got, unexpectedly arrested by federal agents after robbing a bank over a year ago.

Robert’s dialogue and demeanor has all the markings of a temperamental American, petulant at his girlfriend for bowling gutters all day and giddy at being known as a “guy on TV.” Jack brings such untapped ferocity to his character, and rightly so. We find him so immersed in playing piano to blare out the horrible sounds of traffic, he doesn’t even realize he’s headed in the wrong direction, both literally and figuratively. He cheats on his girlfriend with two women, is quick to be indignant and finds both wonderful, stoic honesty and a harsh lack of feeling in conversations with his father and family. All of these elements somehow seem quintessentially American.

Maybe it feels that way because he’s surrounded by so many “filthy” pieces of “crap” who are “all full of shit.” The ones who don’t know better reveal their deep pains, or in Robert’s floozy friend played by Sally Struthers, her naked truth. “When I was four, just four years old, I went to my mother and I said, “What’s this hole in my chin?” – I saw this dimple in my chin in the mirror, and didn’t know what it was. And my mother said – get what my mother says – she says, “When you’re born, you go on a assembly line past God, and if He likes you, He says, “You cute little thing!” and you get dimples there. And if He doesn’t like you, He goes, “Go away.” So about six months later, my mother found me saying my prayers, and I was going, “Now I lay me down to sleep…” My mother says, “What are you covering up your chin for?” And I said, “Because if I cover up the hole, maybe He’ll listen to me.”

The others who think they know better, like a hitchhiker with extreme pessimism and hatred for the filth of mankind (Helena Kallianiotes), doesn’t even realize how hateful she is. Her biting attacks are so cold and disjointed, Director Bob Rafaelson jumps between them with quick wipes and country music smashed in the middle.

Doing this helps keeps “Five Easy Pieces” tumultuous and anecdotal. It allows for a famous moment like the “Chicken Salad Sandwich” scene to stand alone as funny and poignant, and yet it also finds room for a lovely vignette of family and emotion conveyed through a slowly beautiful 360 degree tracking shot purveying photos along the walls.

“Five Easy Pieces” is a film that, by its end, requires us to take a big long look in the mirror and consider seeking a fresh start. Maybe somewhere where its cleaner.

Rapid Response: Father of the Bride (1950)

Vincente Minelli’s “Father of the Bride” plays like a This American Life essay. The dialogue’s descriptive, prose-like writing is observantly funny and amusing rather than ha-ha funny, but it finds a twist on the wedding movie genre by viewing it exclusively from one character’s perspective: Dad’s.

Spencer Tracy is probably the only person who could’ve played Stanley T. Banks, so thank goodness Minnelli outright begged him to take the part. His character is often wrong and jumping to conclusions about his daughter’s (Elizabeth Taylor) new boyfriend, but only Tracy could seem appropriately level-headed and convincing. His concerns aren’t rambling and idiotic but show how a father might genuinely feel and act as they quite literally give away the person in their life who means the most to them.

“She’ll always love us, but not in the old way,” Banks says as he watches his daughter stare longingly into the eyes of the handsome Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor). “She’ll be tossing scraps.” This is Banks’s selfish view, but it’s not completely unwarranted. Her love belongs to someone else now.

We sympathize with him because Minnelli never leaves Banks’s side. Spencer Tracy is in every scene of “Father of the Bride,” and it’s funny because seemingly behind the scenes, the wedding that his family is planning has grown exponentially and all beyond his control. He doesn’t know how it all happened so fast, and neither do we. Minnelli suddenly places us in ungodly lavish sets and lets time and space rush by us in awkward wide shots and long takes. There’s one scene where the camera is placed looking out the front door as Banks stands in the hallway answering the phone. He can’t leave, but scurrying all around us and entering and exiting the frame from all four sides are dozens of movers and wedding planners turning the scene into chaos without any camera movement at all.

There’s a similar sensation when the wedding party rehearses the ceremony for the first time. The moment passes by in a blur. The camera is at a high angle looking down and trying to make sense of this whole fiasco, and the dialogue is all composed of carefully layered voices on the soundtrack that keep us from focusing on just one. The execution is tidy, but the feeling is of a big mess.

Best of all, “Father of the Bride” ends simply without a big moment of family love or a Stanley Kramer-esque speech delivered by Tracy. It’s just a calming conclusion to a long, hectic wedding.