Leave it to celebrated playwright-screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, the Bard of the working stiff, to take a painfully honest look at a lower middle class family aspiring to throw a wedding bash for their only daughter. For Chayefsky's plain spoken Bronx folks who live from tiny paycheck to tiny paycheck, their daughter's impending marriage pulls off the thin band-aid covering the frustration built up from a lifetime of self-sacrifice.
No one knew this territory better than Chayefsky, who one year earlier in 1955 captured everyone's hearts with "Marty", the film based on his TV play about a lonely Bronx butcher who at last finds love. The film made a star out of Ernest Borgnine and established Chayefsky as the premier chronicler of middle class strife.
"The Catered Affair" was another Chayefsky TV play adapted into a movie.....by of all people, that witty sophisticate Gore Vidal. This time the story centered on people who could very well have been Marty's next door neighbors, Tom and Aggie Hurley (Borgnine and Bette Davis, doing the most affecting, skillful work of her entire career). After a lifetime of scraping dollars together, cab driver Tom finally has enough money to buy a New York cab medallion, thereby owning and operating his own taxi cab. But Tom's tough, long suffering, blunt talking wife demands a wedding party for their engaged daughter Jane (Debbie Reynolds).......the agony of having to deny Jane a college education due to their limited savings has weighed heavily on both of them for years.
Jane and her fiance (an oddly miscast Rod Taylor, trying to appear less hunky by wearing glasses) want a simple quick ceremony followed by a honeymoon road trip to California. But Bette Davis, at her most formidable and yet most subdued, won't be denied, dreaming of gifting her daughter with a lifelong wedding memory she herself never experienced. Bognine bellows in frustration at the expected costs of the wedding party.....it will decimate his taxi-medallion fund, forever ending his long held dream of being his own boss.
Dramatic, heart-rending clashes ensue, but don't despair.....there's ample comic relief provided by the Hurleys' live-in boarder, Aggie's aging brother Jack (Barry Fitzgerald). Fitzgerald's lovable old Irish boyo seems dropped into this movie directly from "The Quiet Man", but he's an always welcome sight and considerably lightens up the kitchen sink angst.
Warning: the acting in the final scenes of this film will put a grip on your heart like few movies of today are capable of. There's a brief moment between Borgnine and Davis that's stunning in its powerful simplicity. Bette Davis, after a lifetime of over-the-top performances, controls her work here with subtle perfection......and ends up with a more unforgettable character than any of her previous scenery-chewing dames. Even Davis herself agreed it was her best work.
BQ says seek this one out wherever you may find it.....we'll wrap up five wedding bouquets for "The Catered Affair" (*****), a FIND OF FINDS. Consider this post an engraved invitation....you don't even have to RSVP.....
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