gkeith_1 Wife portrayed as totally dumb. She had no job. She had control over no money. She almost said her husband was the smartest, and that she was stupid. Archie and Edith.Husband didn't want her to spend one dollar to hear a speech from a modern woman who would be discussing women's situation in the eighteen eighties.Good acting. I am giving it eight out of ten because of the portrayal of attitudes of the time. This is a wealthy family, of white WASPS who are Episcopalian mostly church goers. A friend is Methodist, in whose church there are slight Protestant Christian differences from the Episcopalians.Elizabeth Taylor gets third billing. She is ridiculed by other reviewers here, but I think she did very well. Her character is forward for a female of the time, and her romantic interest is naïve and selfish. He is trying to emulate the personality of his curmudgeon of a father; the father of this film.Irene Dunne was a great singer; witness her voice in Show Boat or was it dubbed? She hums a few bars here, at least in the version I saw.Powell was not just Nick Charles. He was also Florenz Ziegfeld. He was also Godfrey in My Man Godfrey, in which he is a bum who becomes a butler; he is the Forgotten Man of the Great Depression.Here, he is the cantankerous curmudgeon, the name of which I have mentioned several times. He does not respect women, and he talks down to them. He teaches his sons that women are ignorant, backward crybabies who would never carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.White WASPS are the main characters. They are the elite. Irish women, or even recent immigrants, are portrayed as airheads who cannot carry trays as maids, who have nothing is their ditzy little heads.ZaSu Pitts does a turn here, of a cousin. She is not her usual comedic self. She is more droll and lifeless than I have seen her in other performances.Martin Milner as a young lad is interesting. He later appeared in the Adam Twelve TV series, as a police officer.Do not call this film dated. It was made after World War Two, when the world was crying for sweet nostalgia, a world of Gilded Age niceties and cooks and housemaids. The audience was tired of movies about killing and fighting.The long running play on which this film is based ran from pre World War Two to afterward, actually starting in the later years of the Great Depression. The play and film must have both been uplifting to audiences during dark and gloomy times.Eight out of ten.

duanyfinancial I am a movie collector/historian, with thousands of titles in my library, dating back to 1914, and I consider this MASTERPIECE, Life With Father(1947), the best film ever made. First of all, the story, was an autobiography by Clarence Day Jr.(1935). It was made into a play in 1939. "The 1939 Broadway production ran for over seven years to become the longest-running non-musical play on Broadway, a record that it still holds. It also held the title of the longest running Broadway play of any type of all time from 1947 to 1972."When the play was made into a movie, in 1947, it garnished 6 Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Actor, William Powell.Apart from all this, this movie is a sheer delight, dealing with the simple fact, that Clarence Day, the patriarch of the family, has never been baptized, but, much more important than this, this autobiographical story, shows us what life was like in a middle class family in New York city, circa 1880. Masterful director, Michael Curtiz, juggles religion, and a near death sickness, with romance, family life, and mingles it all with a joyful comedy of manners. William Powell, and Irene Dunne are flawless, Edmund Gwenn(Miracle on 34th Street), and Zasu Pitts, are fabulous as supporting players, and ingenue, Elizabeth Taylor is exquisite in this role that took her from children parts to young adult. All in all, this movie should be watched every Father's Day, in remembrance of what Hollywood once achieved in it's Golden Age.

moonspinner55 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 ****

secondtake Life with Father (1947)A strained, loud, stiff, but rich, snappy affair...an acquired taste!I think this movie might be very funny to some people, but at first I could barely watch it. It has one of my favorite comic actors of the 1930s, William Powell, but makes him so pompous and loud and ill at ease, he has lost all of his wry charm and genuine humor. Not that he jokes or even tries to be comic here, but his role (as the "father" in question) is offputting.The sons are frankly bad actors in bad roles, too, cardboard, smiling clichés. The visiting girlfriend is none other than a young and fresh Liz Taylor (she's fifteen here), and she brings life to some scenes just as often as she overacts others. The upper crust New York household with its rules and with its whole family about to burst from all the restrictions (poverty not one of them, for sure) is not really funny. The filming is static, the camera stable, the light garish, and the color (Technicolor) egregious (everyone has red hair, it seems). Even after an hour I was still wondering what exactly the whole point of it was. Can we really just be waiting for the girl to hook up with one of the sons, as the father rants in strident tones about the price of a coffee pot?No, we can't. What makes the movie work is the building of familiarity with the characters, so their humor, their occasional warmth, and the real, unfunny events later on have their effect.The lead character's wife, played by Irene Dunne, is a relief, though she can't save every scene any more than Taylor can. Director Michael Curtiz is known for making scores of reasonable but not especially memorable movies, but hey, he made one of the best, Casablanca, and one of my favorites, Mildred Pierce. This is more typical, sadly. The story is based on the true childhood memories of the American writer Clarence Day (of no fame other than this material, which was a huge Broadway hit before the movie was made). So I go back to where I started--this really might be funny if you have a different take on it all, or you don't find Powell grating in his role. It clips along with lots of yelling, so maybe if you like Carol Burnett you'll be okay. Ha. Seriously, relax and accept the characters for something very different than we expect 130 years later, and everyone will grow on you.