Laugh Track - Father's Little DividendRating:
Release Date: 16 December, 2003 Retail Price: $14.99 OUR Price: $13.49 You SAVE: $1.50! Cast: Complete Cast (12 total) |
Laugh Track - Father's Little Dividend Reviews
Spencer Tracy in a quickie sequel to "Father of the Bride"
After the success of 1950's "Father of the Bride," M-G-M produced this sequel the following year. This time around Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) learns that his daughter Kay (Elizabeth Taylor) and son-in-law Buckley Dunstan (Don Taylor) are going to have a baby. Father, of course, is no more thrilled with the idea of being a grandfather than he was about Kay getting married in the first place, and even when the baby arrives and insists on crying every time he is in Stanley's arms, his worst fears seem to be confirmed.
Joan Bennett as his wife Elllie, along with Billie Burke and Moroni Olsen as the other soon-to-be grandparents, all do their best to help poor Stanley through this latest trauma, but Tracy's best moments are when he his daughter comes over to see "Pops" (Taylor called Tracy "Pops" the rest of his life and treated him like a real father figure). "Father's Little Dividend" is a cute film, but certainly not as charming as the original, mainly because it is taking the same approach, albeit with a slightly different topic. Even Tracy's performance really comes across as being a little less of the same as the original.
This 1951 film was also directed by Vincent Minnelli and Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett once again did the screenplay using the characters first created in Edward Streeter's novel. "Father's Little Dividend" was remade, in a round about way, in the recent Steve Martin vehicle "Father of the Bride II," which puts some twists on the story that offer some further complications.
Decent sequel but ultimately forgettable
I'm sure it seemed a good thing to do -- follow up on the success of "Father of the Bride" with a chapter two. There are a few fun moments here and it is nice to see the entire cast reunited, but the sequel lacks the strength of the original. It's decent but far from memorable.
In this case, the Steve Martin remake, which diverges almost completely from the plot of the original (for good reasons), is more enjoyable. I found the end of this version, with Stanley misplacing the baby, a bit dark and not treated comically enough.
Many reviewers have lamented the poor sound quality of the DVD. Well, with a decent sound system it ends up sounding like most VHS copies. What is more embarrassing, at least on this DVD packaging are errors in the trivia game -- they don't even get Ellie's name right! Did they even watch this movie?
I'd actually like to see this reissued with a decent sound-track someday, but there are more important older movies to be revived first...
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