THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 787, 20 August 1954, Page 17

THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING

(Stanley Kramer-Columbia) ECAUSE I grade this a shade lower than the film I have discussed above, | I would not have you conclude that this second Stanley Kramer production is less worthy of consideration. The two come from different worlds. ~The first reflects the extroverted exuberance of a small boy’s imagination, The Member

of the Wedding (director, Fred Zinnemann) explores with delicacy and tenderness the agonies and anguish of a pre-adolescent girl. Frankie Addams (Julie Harris) is a gangling twelve-year-old imprisoned for one long sleepy Southern summer in

the wasteland between infancy and youth, She is too young to share the excitements of adol-escence-the neighbourhood girls won’t make her a member of their club-and too old to find any pleasure in the nursery make-believe of her little cousin John Henry (Brandon de Wilde). She is wildly imaginative, indrawn and morbidly sensitive ("I feel just exactly like somebody has,peeled all the skin off me"). And she has no mother, Beyond her own incessant daydreams (her soldier brother is coming home to be married, and Frankie’s decision to be "a member of the wedding" touches off the film’s emotional climax), the child’s only source of comfort is Berenice the Negro cook, a character of great innate dignity and all-embracing compassion. The film has certain flaws: the tempo at times matches too closely the sluggish rhythm of the South, the continuity is twice broken sharply, and the script is a little too wordy. But the acting of Julie Harris and Ethel Waters is almost faultless, and the film has an inner integrity which offsets its technical shortcomings. Especially recommended for parents.