WEDDING BREAKFAST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 7

WEDDING BREAKFAST

(M.G.M.) G Cert. OU’LL discover, if you see Wedding Breakfast (and I hope you do), that it is impossible not to be reminded of Marty, which had this department scratching for superlatives just a year ago. Here again is a film from a TV play by the brilliant Paddy Chayefsky, here is Ernest Borgnine on what begins to look like his home ground; here is Love in the Bronx, Part the Second. And because art is not made to order (and what appear to be sequels usually invite invidious comparison, anyway), you may feel that Wedding Breakfast does not quite measure up to the standard set twelve ménths ago. I myself don’t think that it does. The direction of Richard Brooks is not as controlled and incisive as that which Delbert Mann (trained in the tougher discipline of TV) gave to the earlier film. The photography of John Alton is a little more self-con-scious than the documentary realism of Joseph LaShelle, and Mr. Chayefsky himself-who boldly (and successfully) left Marty without any formal ending at all-here ties up all the loose ends a litthe more neatly than is consistent with realism. But with "all possible objections noted, all minor lapses (the occasional flavour of ham, the obvious comic relief, the slightly over-crowded foreground) duly catalogued, Wedding Breakfast is still a fine film, true in its essentials to a specific environment and to the pres-

sures and the sanctions which can make life both wryly comic and tragic on the lower middle-class level. And it is splendidly acted. The film was worth making for Bette Davis’s performance alone, and is a triumphant assertion of her capacity as a character actress. Borgnine, as might be expected, plays the harassed Bronx husband to the manner (and the milieu) born. And, as sometimes happens, the junior members of the cast seemed spurred on to excel themselves, I’ve known Debbie Reynolds before as a pleasant enough little song-and-dance girl, but here-with the glamour sponged off-she really comes to life. And as the young man who wants to marry her quietly and without fuss, an Australian newcomer, Rod Taylor, gives an equally convincing performance. And the same quality is apparent almost all along the line. The only exception, to my mind, was Barry Fitzgerald, who has played the crotchety old leprechaun so long that everything he touches turns to whimsy. But when due account has been made of all the talents, it is Bette Davis who will persist longest in my recollection. Her portrait of the East Side apartment housewife — disillusioned, _ inarticulate, sagging somewhat hopelessly into middle age-is in its way as remarkable as any performance I have seen from her since she first appeared as a star in The Man Who Played God. Her determination that her daughter (Debbie Reynolds) shall have a proper wedding-"whether

you like it or not, and if you don’t like it you don’t need to come"-is the product of a complex of desires, guilts and compulsions all of which Miss Davis precisely conveys without for a moment slipping out of character. It’s the kind: of performance that should be commemorated, and perhaps there will be an Oscar for her in April. But if there isn’t then I think she deserves some special award ‘for this comeback-a Davis cup, perhaps.