If you see Vincente Minnelli's Father Of The Bride, it's worth remembering that in 1950, a studio such as MGM owned everything, including the stars. This is one of the last great productions of the 'studio system'. It meant a film could be cast perfectly all down the line from in-house employees such as Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Bennett - the studio could afford to re-shoot any scene and even alter an ending to suit sneak-preview reactions, all in the name of popular entertainment. Art, frequently, was the outcome, too.
But there was something else MGM did to make Father Of The Bride a sure-fire hit. It remodelled fantasy to keep in step with reality. Elizabeth Taylor, then barely 18, was about to marry Nick Hilton, heir to the hotel chain - and as she watched her daughter floating to the telephone after a hard day at the studios to take a call from Nick, then apparently sink into a trance, Mrs Taylor might well have imagined Elizabeth looked like an actress playing the role of a young girl in love. She behaves in the film exactly as she was in real life, apparently blissfully in thrall to her fiance and touchingly grateful to her parents for bringing her up and providing for her. In the film, Tracy and Bennett are fearful at one point that the wedding will be called off and their daughter thrown back into the family nest.
In real life, that was Elizabeth's nightmare, too, though for different reasons. She was marrying to escape her parents' over-protectiveness. But she wasn't yet prepared to have children by her husband-to-be - and thus produce heirs to a hotel chain - until the wild young Nick had settled down. So, beneath her public expressions of rapture, there was the anxiety that her union, if it took place at all, might be short-lived. (It took place, and it was short-lived). But MGM concealed all these real-life worries, or, rather, converted them into the human comedy on screen. In the film, the wealth of her fiance (Don Taylor) doesn't begin to match the fortune of the Hilton boy; but then if it had, MGM wouldn't have had the marvellous fun of making Spencer Tracy wrestle with the expenses of the wedding before finally deciding his daughter's happiness was worth the figure on the bottom line of the bills to come.
Elizabeth's real-life father was also feeling that life was an MGM comedy. 'I keep thinking of Spencer,' said Francis Taylor, wistfully. 'All he has to do is stand up there and act the part I'm living.' Tracy acts it brilliantly, too, from the funny down-beat post-wedding opening to the happiest of endings. Elizabeth married Nick Hilton on 6 May 1950, the movie was released on 16 June 1950 - one was a trailer for the other. MGM paid for the real wedding and filled the pews with its stars. The illusion of screenland must never be allowed to fade. That was movie-making then.
Father of the Bride (1950)
