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Not dead but out of his time, the eponymous upholder of tradition, blessed all the same with Ronald Colman's mellifluous courtliness. Upper-crust Boston ca. 1912, "not just a city, it's a state of mind." The patriarch is an avid birdwatcher stopped in his tracks by the sight of a yellow-bellied sapsucker, his home is his castle where he quotes Emerson to a disinterested maid. Thanksgiving dinner and its accompanying rites, the cousins nudged into an engagement, the same seats for nearly two decades. "We suffer from ancestor worship," snaps the daughter (Peggy Cummins), first seen descending the staircase into a sparkling close-up. (The camera later moves in for another choice portrait seconds before she takes a snowball to the puss.) Cracks in the cement, a realization in the study while a waltz plays outside. "My world, narrow?" Joseph L. Mankiewicz and the vanishing old order, calm as Lubisch, grave as Visconti. Provincial gentility and the tilted painting that's straightened until it isn't, the tome by a certain Sigmund F. is read with the missus (Edna Best) furtively but attentively. "It seems to be very largely a book about... sex." Curtiz's Life with Father is parallel, a hummed ditty making its way through the household indicates Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. The niece (Vanessa Brown) inherits the wedding dress but pines for New York City, the brother-in-law (Percy Waram) has a knack for gently pricking the prattle. "Yesterday's radical is today's stuffed shirt," or is it the other way around? "Little things that interfere with our lives," emotions by any other name, thus the climactic rebirth of the paterfamilias out of It Happened One Night. Mankiewicz sees the overthrow from a different angle in House of Strangers. With Richard Haydn, Charles Russell, Richard Ney, Mildred Natwick, and Nydia Westman. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |