WEEK-END WITH FATHER (1951)

Once critically dismissed, but later acclaimed (after early retirement) especially for his strikingly stylized TechniColored Hollywood melodramas on middle-class life & morality in the 1950s, Danish-German director Douglas Sirk was anything but a one-trick pony.  War films, historicals, exotic foreign drama, Chekhov; dig a little into his L.A. films or the earlier work in German to find all sorts of surprises.*  But light domestic family comedy?  Sit-com ready middle-class farce?  Seems like a stretch, no?  Well, no.  As seen here in Blended Family/Father Knows Best format, Sirk takes on all comers as widower Van Heflin (sending his two girls off to camp) and widow Patricia Neal (sending her two off to its bordering boy’s facility) meet-cute at Grand Central Station, briefly commiserate and quickly fall for each other while the kids are away.  But what will happen when they all meet up over Parents’ Week-End?  No doubt, you’ve guessed the entire Brady Bunch plot, but there’s no way you’d guess how lightly, how winningly Sirk runs the genial slapstick action.  Reversing M.O. from his signature mellers, he steps back from OTT players & rhymed storylines (only King Vidor successfuly dove deeper into the gorgeous absurdities of that genre*) and relaxes to achieve more modest goals.  The physical comedy routines trying to hit singles & doubles rather than swinging for the fences, moving his plot thru well-meant behavior & sanity rather than escalating stupidity and blind misunderstandings.  Seems simple, but not so common in Hollywood farce.  Even the music score with but one exception, staying away from laugh track prompts on unfunny set pieces.  Van Heflin & Patricia Neal show relief lowering the wattage while the four children, something of a kiddie all-star line-up, with goof-faced Tommy Rettig (a natural Penrod or Calvin in CALVIN & HOBBES) stealing every frame he’s in.  Plus romantic rivalry courtesy of he-man Richard Denning’s shirtless camp coordinator and Virginia Field as a tv star who’d love to have Heflin without the girls.  Taken as it lies, good, modest fun.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Vincente Minnelli, Nick Ray and a half-dozen others might have been added here.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Universal happy enough with the results to double-down next year, assigning Sirk to a sweet-natured, old-fashioned piece of Americana (with a subversive twist) in HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL/’52.  OR:  *On the cusp of leaving UFA/Germany, a little known masterful meller, LA HABANERA/’37.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/07/has-anybody-seen-my-gal-19542.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/la-habanera-1937.html