LIFE WITH FATHER
A film review by M Formlios
Copyright 1996 M Formlios
This is not a film to be looked at with any kind of modernist perspective. It was made in another era, and it looks back at an era prior to that. Whether or not you relate to it, there is much to be said about it still.
The character Clarence Day Sr., as played by William Powell, has a gruff, pompous, hard to handle exterior countenance. For all of his blustering, and all of the yelling that goes on within his household, they all function together as a sort of family unit. This is not the Roseanne kind of family love, but rather a solid bond of Victorian fellowship, that careens through the film, veering from the ridiculous involving Clarence, Jr's wearing his father's suits, to the kinds of male friendships that Clarence Sr. bestows upon his sons.
Irene Dunne, as his wife, Vinnie, is a shrewd manipulator, but also somewhat of an airhead. She loves him as much as he loves her, but she really knows how to handle him. Due to the time period represented in this film, New York in 1883, she cannot rise too far above the expected feminine conventions of the day. She and he frequently argue points of logic that neither one has a clue about. He tries as hard as he can to defend himself against her wiles, but it is a no-win situation for him, for when logic doesn't work for her, she resorts to forming her own kind of logic to win him over.
Just as Buckwheat cannot be viewed anymore in a fashion relevant to the present time period, it becomes necessary to discard all preconceptions as to what should and should not be right, and to simply take the film at face value. It doesn't matter that we no longer relate to it, it doesn't even matter whether the New York and home environments created here reflect actual living conditions, or were just a byproduct of the Hollywood imagination. What does matter is that the film does entertain in its own right.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews