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Cheaper By the DozenRating:
Release Date: 16 March, 2004 Retail Price: $14.98 OUR Price: $9.99 You SAVE: $4.99! Cast: Complete Cast (6 total) |
Cheaper By the Dozen Reviews
movie based on a nonfiction biography
The book by the same name was a best seller and for good reason. It is touching, entertaining, funny, moving, etc. This movie in 1950 captures that spirit. The setting is the years before and after World War I.
The father was strict, but he never took himself too seriously, and he dearly loved his wife and each of their children. And they loved him.
The movie is a series of some of the best vignettes in the book. A lot of the anecdotes had to be left out, of course. The book includes scenes from their courtship and from Gilbreth's earlier life.
He was from a poor family and started out as a bricklayer's apprentice. Laying bricks and watching what he was doing and how he was doing it led him to develop the principles of time-and-motion study. Soon, he started his own bricklaying business; and by applying his principles, he could get a bricklaying job done three-times faster than his competitors. Also, his methods were such that his workmen did not get as tired. Also, as I recall, he gave them a five-minute break every hour. Because he could complete three jobs in the time it took his competitors to complete one, he was able to afford to underbid his competitors and still make more profit. He paid his workers higher wages than his competitors, hence he was able to hire the best workers, which further increased his competitive advantage. With the money he made, he finally set himself up in business as an "efficiency expert", an unheard-of field at the time.
There are also scenes of the courtship of these two who were from opposite sides of the track. Her mother was opposed to the match, of course. She didn't listen and was happy the rest of her life.
In these times, when children are raised by daycare centers and TV sets, it is difficult to comprehend a family like the Gilbreths. It was less difficult at the time this movie came out. Not all families were as happy but many were. The book and the movie are less about raising a family efficiently than about raising them well. Mrs. Gilbreth was a psychologist and understood that. Instead of dismissing this movie and the book as make-believe, people with children would do well to get the book and try to learn from it.
Also, enjoy it. The book and the movie are funny, thought-provoking and moving.
A Serious-Comic View of an America that Never Was
CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN is a funny yet sobering looking back at a turn of the century America that had nothing to do with its historical reality. Frank B. Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey were two children in a brood of a dozen, all of whom were raised by a stern, military-minded father who wished to test his ideas on industrial efficiency on his own family. The father, well-played by Clifton Webb, comes across as the prototypical Victorian father from a previous generation of such. His job was to increase the production efficiency of industry, a task that he was so good at, that he saw no reason why the same principles could not be applied to the mass raising of a very large family. Myrna Loy is the mother who has to balance the stern approach of her husband with the realization that what works on the assembly line of a factory does not carry over to the assembly line of a house.
CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN is not a plot-driven film. Indeed, it is mostly a series of vignettes whose only link is to show a view of how a huge family collectively experienced the comedy of a basically good-natured clan, all of whom slowly began to realize that the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts. As director Walter Lang presented each of the clan, he did so against a backdrop of an America that seems much like the rural-based cartoons which showed an idealized small-town nation that existed in a political and social vacuum. Nowhere in the film is there the slightest hint that outside the doors of the family house were there any economic dislocations or social inequalities. The joy of the film, then, rests in how the family members bounce off each other and off society at large. The father, Mr. Gilbreth, films his entire family having their tonsils removed so as to allow him to make suggestions to improve future tonsillectomies. He takes his children to their new school and lectures the principal on the proper pedagogy of teaching. He accompanies his eldest daughter to her high school prom as an unwelcome chaperone. And while all this is going on, his wife acts as the lubricant who reduces the stress and friction that would have ripped apart any other family. The audience laughs at this, but this laughter is not the sort that arises from slapstick and farce. Rather, it originates in the all too human understanding that life has its comic side even while potential tragedy lurks uncomfortably close.
By the film's end, the viewer has seen a sanitized version not only of an America that never was but also of a family unity that may have been, but its essential cohesiveness of love and support lingers in the imagination long enough to make that viewer feel a sense of kinship and loss. CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN is a rare treat of how one family prospered against the odds of numbers.
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