Not Any Bed of Roses: THE CATERED AFFAIR (1956)

Ah, Richard Brooks.  Arguably the most underrated American director of all time, he can be best described as being the “other Sidney Lumet.”  Like Lumet, he sticks to a naturalistic, un-arty yet still artistically stimulating directing style, and his stories tend to focus on complex, realistic characters caught in morally ambiguous situations.  Such is the case with his two most famous directorial efforts, Elmer Gantry and In Cold Blood.  He was also notable for making exemplary literary and theatrical adaptations, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Brothers Karamazov, Lord Jim, and Sweet Bird of Youth.  I’ll probably be highlighting more films by him in the future, but today we’ve got The Catered Affair, a Paddy Chayefsky teleplay adapted for the screen by Gore Vidal.  Already students of classic American film should be clamoring for popcorn to munch and copies of Network and Marty to stroke like kittens.

Also adding to the star power is the cast, headed by Bette Davis and Ernest Borgnine.  Most people familiar with the actors wouldn’t think of them even entering the same room, much less appearing in a film as husband and wife.  But there they are, completely embodying Tom and Agnes Hurley, a middle-aged, blue-collar couple, stooped and cramped in their tiny Bronx apartment and living off the meager earnings of Tom’s position driving a taxi.  To this claustrophobic living environment are added Agnes’s brother Jack (Barry Fitzgerald), their son Eddie (Ray Stricklyn) and their daughter Jane (Debbie Reynolds).

One morning Jane offhandedly mentions that she is going to get married “next Thursday” to her boyfriend Ralph (Rod Taylor).  Knowing that her parents have little money, she is planning for the ceremony to be small and as unobtrusive as possible.  “Unenthused” isn’t exactly the right term for their reactions to the news.  Tom barely looks up from his paper at first, and Agnes makes a face like her daughter was a chronic schizophrenic declaring for the umpteenth time that she’s Napoleon.  Her attempt to explain her plans isn’t helped by the machine-gun bickering that ignites whenever more than one member of the Hurley family is in the room.  The conversations between this bunch are written unbelievably well, not only bitingly entertaining but really plunging the viewer into not only the culture but the attitude of this Bronx Irish family.  Each member of the family, whether they be crass or reserved, gruff or sweet, has the same pragmatic and somewhat displeased worldview that is illustrated beautifully through the combinations of words from the Chayefsky/Vidal script.  Chayefsky always had that talent for very carefully choosing his character’s vocabulary in the way that stuck in the mind the most.  I’m not sure where Chayefsky ends and Vidal begins, and I’m not sure I want to spoil the magic by finding out.

This scene also sets the tone for what kind of set design we’re going to be looking forward to.  The Hurley’s apartment is a masterpiece of claustrophobic tenement life, never missing an opportunity to show six pieces of furniture jammed into a room fit to store four, or showing just how embarrassingly bare one can make electrical wiring.  I particularly like one moment where the single light bulb in the kitchen flickers when Agnes shuts the fridge door.  Working in this environment, Brooks’s directing palette calls for very few camera angles to be used in the tight spaces, framing his characters in doorways and windows to create an illusion of confinement.  He adds to this stiff feeling by rarely zooming, and using marginal panning.  It makes me wonder if the set was built to not have moveable walls, which would severely limit camera angles.

Although the Hurleys initially react to the idea of marriage with little enthusiasm, Agnes eventually gets the idea in her head that Jane’s going to get a big, fancy wedding, the wedding that she never got.  There are a lot of reasons for this, and the film gives more than a few points where her mind appears to change.  Perhaps it changed at the crowded market scene, where acquaintances pester her about the specifics of the wedding and wonder, with a certain air of judgmental suspicion, why the ceremony is so rushed.  Perhaps she felt bad that she wouldn’t be inviting her brother to the ceremony, because if she invited him she would have to invite a whole huge pack of other relatives, and that would mean a heck of a lot more money.  The real clincher, however, is when Ralph and his parents come over to the Hurleys’ for dinner.  It is a surprisingly awkward scene.  Ralph’s parents are far more well off than Jane’s, and between raucous laughter and drinking like to boast about how they threw big weddings for their other children.  All the while Agnes painfully pretends to be of a higher crust than naturally befalls her (letting out a hilariously phony and awkward laugh at one of the jokes), and Tom wants nothing more than to relax and tell that story that Agnes cut him off from before it started for fear of embarrassment.  An interesting shot puts Tom’s nervous, flustered face next to the broadly erupting mouth of Ralph’s father as he describes the apartment he put his daughter in.  The dinner abruptly ends when Jack comes in with his best bad mood on, letting slip that he lives in the living room and that Ralph’s mother is sitting on his bed.

This all culminates in a big argument involving all five Hurleys, in which Jack proclaims he’s moving out for not being invited to the wedding, and where Agnes booms, “You’re gonna have a big wedding whether you like it or not!  And if you don’t like it you don’t have to come!”  After the inevitable cool-down, Agnes decides that the only thing that can convince her daughter is to tell her the truth.  Agnes is ashamed of how poorly her own wedding turned out, and a few other delicate things, and doesn’t want to leave her daughter without a single good memory of her time with her mother.  And, luckily for Agnes, this works, but Jane has some obvious reservations.  These reservations are shared and amplified by Ralph, and the rest of the film is a beautifully detailed unfolding of the situation’s various facets.

One of the charms of this film is its ability to surprise the viewer in seemingly familiar material.  For example, Jane’s best friend Alice (Joan Camden) feels very uncomfortable when she is present for the dress fitting, and later reveals to Jane that her husband and her would love to come, but can’t afford the clothes required.  It’s a little fascinating how Agnes seemingly doesn’t notice Tom’s increasingly shocked reactions to how much everything is going to cost, especially in a truly humiliating sequence at the planner’s office (One of the best shots of the film shows Tom painfully stalking away from the office through a streamer-adorned, post-party ballroom).  Equally fascinating is how she can whip up an appearance of class with a smoother dress and keeping her eyes nice and big.  And also fascinating is how many different psychological and emotional motives the viewer can hypothesize for Agnes’s turn of control.

However, one issue dominates the proceedings nearly completely.  For twelve years, Tom has been planning to open his own taxi service with his best friend Eddie (Jay Adler), and has been steadily building up enough money to pay his half of the $1000 down payment.  This extra-extra catered affair, ballooned by Agnes’s obsession, will not only wipe out the $500 that Tom owes to the down payment, but all of his savings in the process.  It’s in this way that the issue turns away from a conflict between Agnes and Jane and into one between Agnes and Tom, with Jane an unwitting pawn in Agnes’s larger, selfish plot.  It isn’t that Agnes is a bad person; it’s just that when you’re given very little in life, getting to the nitty gritty of your personal issues, such as the state of a marriage, gets pushed aside for more pragmatic needs.

I wouldn’t want to spoil all the emotional developments near the end of the story, or whether or not the big marriage goes through, but I will say that it’s a great showcase of Davis’s and Borgnine’s acting chops.  Davis was always a fantastic actress, but here she shows a very different side of herself, moving away from the headstrong glamour of her early years and edging more towards a nuanced and mature sense of life.  Borgnine embodies a broad blue-collar sensibility with ease, but adds enough fire and intelligence of his own to make his character a very real, concerned presence, helping to drive the film alongside Davis rather than be overtaken by her.  It also helps that Davis can keep her eyes on the “unamused” setting in order to make her subtleties actual subtleties.

As for the supporting performances, they are all fairly excellent (especially in the way that Debbie Reynolds and Rod Taylor keep up intelligence and awareness in somewhat befuddled, pawn-like roles), save for one.  And, to be honest, it isn’t that the performance is bad so much that the character, as it is designed, seems a little bizarre in the movie.  This is the character of Jack, as embodied by Barry Fitzgerald.  I don’t know a whole lot about Fitzgerald, but can see how he’d be a dead ringer for leprechaun roles.  His character is basically a County Cork resident jammed into a Bronx household, and I didn’t believe for a second that Jack was actually Agnes’s brother (except for maybe by marriage, with him stepping off the boat a couple of years prior).  His character is also the subject of an unnecessary subplot, where he develops a romance with a widower by the name of Mrs. Rafferty.  Fitzgerald is definitely a skilled actor, but his presence in this film is confusing, and was one of the things that critics skewered.

In fact, this film got seriously skewered upon its release, and largely ignored by more contemporary critics (such as the usually reliable Pauline Kael in her book 5001 Nights at the Movies).  I honestly didn’t understand their reactions, especially the reviews from its initial release.  One of the most simultaneously scathing and uncalled-for reviews came from Ronald B. Rogers of the Village Voice, who stated:

“’The Catered Affair’ may not be very entertaining, but it certainly is loud, tasteless, shrill, and depressing.  It more actually resembles the Sid Caesar satire of “Marty” than it approximates the human characteristics of the Bronx family it pictures.”

He then insults Davis for being a “padded and grotesque Tweedledum of a mother” and Borgnine as seeming “bewildered and depressed.”  A more recent review by the staff of Variety weren’t pleased with the “talky, mostly drab, affair.”  Dennis Schwartz, on his site Ozu’s World Movie Reviews, headed up his review with the phrase “Plays like Marty but without the same winsome appeal,” and claims that director Richard Brooks “directs with an eye out for gritty realism, but fails to catch the sudden swings that go from pungency to farce without having the film fall on its face over all the vulgarism and drabness on display.”  Every one of these reviews seems to overlook Brooks’s finely unobtrusive direction, the script’s prevailing wisdom and keen eye for detail, and all of the wonderful nuance and urgency in the performances.  Adding insult to injury, the film bombed at the box office, and it’s early 90’s VHS release apparently didn’t sell enough to merit a DVD.  Heck, even MGM’s DVD-R service through Amazon.com overlooked the film.  It’s almost as if the reviewers had never seen a film that takes lower class life and people seriously before, becoming blinded by the fact that it deals with poverty and domestic strife without acknowledging just how breezy and entertaining a film it really is.

It’s great how much understanding the film has for the character’s situation, but it’s even better how it doesn’t downplay the seriousness of the story while keeping the pacing brisk and casually adding small but potent doses of humor.  And there are just so many details in the piece, such as how Agnes reacts to her landlady asking for a cup of coffee, and how the son Eddie is becoming a slyer, more svelt version of his father, and all the little tics and patterns of dialogue that Chayefsky and Vidal adore.  The film isn’t particularly depressing compared to other films of the time; in fact, it’s a downright knee-slapper compared to Davis’s twin 1950 masterpieces All About Eve and The Little Foxes, and isn’t nearly as cynical as them, either.  I’ve also noticed that civilian reaction to the film, when it’s been available to view, has been much more enthusiastic, settling with a very respectable 7.2 rating on IMDB.

It’s a truly wonderful film with a dire need of a resurrection, even if to simply relish André Previn’s excellent score, once again proving him to be one of Hollywood’s greatest composers.  It’s also a great piece of evidence towards Richard Brook’s skills as a director, and a wonderful treat for Paddy Chayefsky fans.  Later in her life, Bette Davis would look back upon this film as her finest hour as an actress, and I would be hesitant in contradicting that opinion.  She really plunges herself into the character and comes up with some astonishing material.  If anybody’s going to get the online petitions rolling, it’s Bette Davis fans.  Perhaps a few more fanbases can pitch in, as The Catered Affair stands the test of time as one of the most sympathetic, nuanced, and unforced domestic dramas of 50’s Hollywood.

~PNK