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Friday, August 23, 2019

THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER (1951)

In the late ‘40s/early ‘50s, director George Cukor, with married writers Garson Kanin & Ruth Gordon, made a series of films that took joy in watching everyday little people playing out Life’s Human Comedy. Modest pleasures all, often with documentary-style NYC establishing shots unusual for the period. And here’s a particularly tasty example of the form. Surprise! It’s not Kanin/Gordon, but from producer/co-writer Charles Brackett right after his break with longtime collaborator Billy Wilder. (SUNSET BOULEVARD proving too dark for Brackett’s taste.) And it’s a little marvel, thanks mostly to a typically treasurable turn from character-actor star Thelma Ritter as the titular marriage broker, a professional busybody specializing in Lonely Hearts types. And what a crew of hard-to-match singles she shuffles out of her Flat Iron office building, and at Saturday get-togethers at her apartment. (Anyone who can bring Zero Mostel and Nancy Kulp into mutual romantic orbit is some kind of genius.) Two outliers form the plot as Ritter misdirects cool Jeanne Crain toward Scott Brady’s wolfish X-Ray technician, while Crain upends her own ideas to give Ritter just the romantic push she doesn’t know she’s been waiting for. ‘Push’ being the one thing this delightful film so scrupulously avoids in either sentimentalizing or condescending to its imperfect souls. A real find; a delight.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: You can imagine this becoming a musical a decade later with Cukor’s earlier discovery Judy Holliday in the Ritter role. In fact, it just about happened in Vincente Minnelli/Comden & Green’s BELLS ARE RINGING/’60.

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