My friend Jimmy introduced me last night to a very special movie I had not only never seen but never even heard of. The Catered Affair. I'm still recovering.
The tilted, cock-eyed title credits indicate a funny romp through loving family misunderstandings. Wow, are they misleading! I found The Catered Affair one of the most brutally honest and distressing films about smothered dreams and barely buried resentments ever made. Based on a Paddy Chayefsky teleplay, Gore Vidal comes up with a script about the tangled webs of feeling brought to the surface by a daughter's announcement that she and her longtime boyfriend will be married in a small immediate family ceremony five days hence.
What follows is a heartbreaking chain reaction of smithereened feelings, tiny betrayals, huge resentments, bitter recriminations, gut-wrenching humiliations. Powerful stuff.
Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine pair as the long married parents, whose initial reaction to their daughter's pragmatism is typically blue collar: "She's got a good head on her shoulders". But Davis, fueled by her deeply held fury about her own wedding, shifts into full mother-of-the-bride gear, precipitating showdowns with Borgnine that can only result with the slinging of barbs that can never be unsaid.
Davis is variable in the role. In the early scenes she is wonderful, explaining the ins and outs of marriage to her daughter. But, wedged chronologically about halfway between All About Eve and Baby Jane (1956), she occasionally takes on the oddly consonated rhythms that drag queens would emulate for years forward. All the same, she is heartbreaking. The scene wherein she explains the circumstances of her own wedding to her daughter in a bridal shop dressing room is simple, shocking, horrible. Her daughter, appalled and trying to hide it, says, "Ma, I never heard that story". Davis looks away, purses her lips, and simply relpies "No? I thought'cha had". It's like being kicked in the stomach.
The real shock, in movie terms, though, is the restrained, beautifully muted performance by Debbie Reynolds as the daughter. Cavorting only a year later as the over-the-top, hillbilly hooligan Tammy, I had no idea Reynolds could act. Hoof, sure. But act? Wow!
A musical version of the film - an idea I wish I had had first - opens this Spring at the Walter Kerr. It stars Faith Prince in the Davis role and Tom Wopat in Borgnine's. The "bachelor" uncle played by Barry Fitzgerald in the film is undertaken by bookwriter Harvey Firestien on stage, so I expect a more explicitly gay take. The role that is such a revelation in Reynolds is played in the musical by Leslie Kritzer, so funny in Betsy Kelso's Trailer Park.
The score is by John Bucchino, whose "Grateful" is a cabaret standard. Can't wait!
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