Life with Father (film)


Life with Father is a 1947 Technicolor American comedy film adapted from the 1939 play of the same name, which was inspired by the autobiography of stockbroker and The New Yorker essayist, Clarence Day.
It tells the true story of Day and his family in the 1880s. He wants to be master of his house, but finds his wife and his children ignoring him, until they start making demands for him to change his own life. The story draws largely on the insistence by his wife that Clarence be baptized and Clarence's stubborn, sometimes ill-tempered nature. It stars William Powell and Irene Dunne as Clarence and his wife, supported by Elizabeth Taylor as a beautiful teenage girl with whom Clarence's oldest son becomes infatuated, along with Edmund Gwenn, ZaSu Pitts, Jimmy Lydon and Martin Milner.

Plot summary

Stockbroker Clarence Day is the benevolent curmudgeon of his 1880s New York City household, striving to make it function as efficiently as his Wall Street office but usually failing. His wife Vinnie is the real head of the household. In keeping with the Day's actual family, all the children are redheads. The anecdotal story encompasses such details as Clarence's attempts to find a new maid, a romance between his oldest son Clarence Jr. and pretty out-of-towner Mary Skinner, a plan by Clarence Jr. and his younger brother John to make easy money selling patent medicines, Clarence's general contempt for the era's political corruption and the trappings of organized religion, and Vinnie's push to get him baptized so he can enter the kingdom of God.

Cast

Production

The movie was adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart from the 1939 play by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, which was based on the 1935 autobiography by Clarence Day, Jr. Day had worked as a stockbroker and was an author and cartoonist for The New Yorker. It was directed by Michael Curtiz.
Due to the Motion Picture Production Code standards of the day, the play's last line, "I'm going to be baptized, dammit!" had to be rewritten for the film, with the final word omitted. Mr. Day's frequent outbursts of "Oh, God!" were changed to "Oh, gad!" for the same reason.

Reception

Leading film critics in 1947 gave Life with Father very high marks, especially with regard to the quality of Warner Bros.' screen adaptation of the popular Broadway play and the quality of the cast's performances. The New York Times in its review directed special attention to William Powell's portrayal of Clarence Day:
Film Daily summarized Life with Father as "one of the finer examples of film making in Technicolor" that provides "a delightfully different insight into the human comedy of another day." The entertainment trade publication Variety also complimented Irene Dunne's restrained performance as Vinnie, as well as the work of the film's supporting players and the production's cinematography and overall direction:

Box office

According to Warners the film earned them $5,057,000 domestically and $1,398,000 overseas, for a total of $6,455,000 against a production budget of $4,710,000.

Awards

Life with Father was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Color, Best Cinematography, Color and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture.

Copyright status

Through a clerical error, Life with Father was not renewed for copyright and fell into the public domain in 1975.
Warner Bros. does still own the theatrical distribution and music rights to the film, but other companies have been able to release non-theatrical, public-domain versions.