Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is 1950's "Father of the Bride," directed for MGM by Vincente Minnelli.

It's based on Edward Streeter's best-selling 1949 novel of the same name, adapted for the screen by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

The film stars Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Elizabeth Taylor, and Don Taylor, no relation, ably supported by such stalwarts as Leo G. Carroll, Billie Burke, Moroni Olsen, and Melville Cooper.

The film begins in the immediate aftermath of an elaborate wedding reception following the marriage of Stanley and Ellie Banks' only daughter, Kay, to Buckley Dunstan.

Stanley sits in his home amid the party debris and reflects on the previous three months.

That was when Kay, during the course of an otherwise ordinary family dinner, announced that she was engaged.

Her parents have different reactions.

While Ellie begins to make plans for the wedding, Stanley worries about Kay's future with a young man he hardly remembers meeting.

Soon, he has Ellie worried too and she decides they need to meet Buckley's parents.

The meeting starts off awkwardly, but Stanley soon relaxes after a few drinks and spends the evening praising Kay until he falls asleep in his chair.

The Banks host an engagement party for Kay and Buckley where Stanley spends all his time in the kitchen preparing drinks for his guests and misses most of the festivities.

It slowly begins to dawn on him that the small wedding everyone initially agreed to has ballooned into an elaborate affair with all the trimmings that he, Stanley, will be paying for every bit of it.

After all, he is the father of the bride.

Screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were a married couple with a string of successful movies to their credit before "Father of the Bride."

They provided the scripts for such cinematic classics as "The Thin Man" in 1934, as well as two of its sequels in 1936 and 1939, "It's a Wonderful Life," in 1946, and "Easter Parade" in 1948.

Goodrich and Hackett seemed to have a particular knack for creating both sparkling dialog and the believable relationships between the married couples in their films while still retaining the best elements of the works they were adapting for the screen.

Yet in the case of "Father of the Bride," their most notable and effective improvement to Streeter's novel was to change the way the story was told.

The novel was written in the third person by an omniscient narrator who maintained an ironic distance from its primary character, Stanley T. Banks.

The reader is invited to regard him as a little ridiculous as he attempts to deal with all the rigamarole connected with his daughter's wedding.

But Goodrich and Hackett wisely changed the novel's third person narrative into a first person narration by Stanley Banks himself.

This makes Stanley a more sympathetic character and one the audience is more likely to regard with affection as well as amusement.

The film takes full advantage of Spencer Tracy's charms and skill as both narrator and actor as Stanley careens from a frustration to chagrin to anger to embarrassment and back again, all against the backdrop of his deep and abiding love for his only daughter, Kay.

Spencer Tracy was a highly regarded and versatile film actor, playing roles in dramas, comedies, biographies, and even horror, appearing in both title roles in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" in 1941.

After serving in the First World War and performing on stage during the '20s, Tracy came to Hollywood and first appeared in films in 1930.

But it wasn't until 1935, when he signed with MGM, where Irving Thalberg was head of production, that Tracy came into his own.

He received his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor in 1937 for "San Francisco," and in the next two years won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Actor for his roles in "Captains Courageous" in 1938 and in "Boys Town" in 1939.

He would go on to be nominated for the Best Actor Oscar another six times, including for "Father of the Bride" in 1951.

His last nomination came posthumously in 1968 for his role as another anxious father contemplating the marriage of his beloved only daughter under very different circumstances in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," with Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier.

"Father of the Bride" was a big box office success and one of the highest grossing films of 1950.

MGM immediately began work on a sequel, "Father's Little Dividend," released in 1951, with much of its predecessor's original cast.

10 years later, there was a short-lived television series titled "Father of the Bride" starring Leon Ames as Stanley Banks.

A well-received film remake starring Steve Martin followed in 1991, with its own sequel in 1995.

The trailer for 1950's "Father of the Bride" is presented as a cinematic wedding invitation addressed to the ladies and gentlemen of the audience.

Significantly, the trailer begins and ends with an extended shot of Elizabeth Taylor as Kay Banks in her bridal gown just before the family leaves for the wedding.

There was a sound publicity reason for taking this approach.

"Father of the Bride" had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall on May 18th, 1950 just two days after Elizabeth Taylor's own marriage to Nicky Hilton.

Her bridal gown was designed by Helen Rose, who also designed the gown for Kay Banks in the film.

The marriage ended the following January, although that did not seem to diminish Taylor's enthusiasm for marriage as an institution.

MGM's movie version of "Father of the Bride" was in part an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Edward Streeter's novel, published the previous year.

Critics were generally enthusiastic about the film and compared it favorably to its source.

Since the novel focused on the character of Stanley Banks, Spencer Tracy worked to make his character likable in spite of his apparently congenital crankiness.

Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times, "As a father torn by jealousy, devotion, pride, and righteous wrath, Mr. Tracy is tops."

But John McCarton in The New Yorker identified a problem with the film overall.

"Since the plot consists simply of outlining the difficulties of putting on a wedding, including of course the damnedable expense of it all, it grows a little tiresome after a half hour or so."

Of course, any wedding, except perhaps the smallest and most informal, involves a host of difficulties of one sort or another, and those difficulties tend to grow geometrically in relation to the size of the wedding.

"Father of the Bride," both as a novel and as a motion picture, provides a glimpse into the growth of what we might call the wedding industry in the United States during the post-war period.

The character of Mr. Massoula, ably portrayed by veteran character actor Leo G. Carroll, is what we would now call a wedding planner, invariably guiding the bride's parents to the most tasteful, and expensive, alternatives.

Mr. Banks causes a major family upset when he announces the reception can accommodate no more than 150 guests, until he is coerced into adding 100 more.

The Banks wedding, with all the trimmings, recalls such previous Hollywood bridal extravaganzas as the important wedding of Ellie Andrews and King Westley in 1934's "It Happened One Night," although without the autogyro.

Or the intended wedding of Tracy Lord to George Kittredge in 1940's "The Philadelphia Story."

The similarities between the impressive display of expensive gifts in that film and in "Father of the Bride" is striking.

But Ellie Andrews and Tracy Lord were both brides firmly ensconced in the American upper class, the darlings of fabulously wealthy families.

Stanley Banks, on the other hand, is an attorney, a partner in his law firm, but, at best, a member of the upper portion of the middle class.

His preoccupation with the costs of providing a dream wedding for his daughter merely proves that she and her mother have aspirations far beyond the family's actual social station.

The frequent off-handedness of various wedding professionals providing their services, Mr. Massoula, Mr. Tringle at the church, the various caterers and moving men preparing the house for the reception, indicates that for them this special event is just another day at work.

They know their jobs, they do them well, provided the family doesn't get in the way and the bills get paid.

Both professionals and family are united in their desire to create the perfect wedding, no matter what the financial or emotional cost to Mr. Banks.

But at its heart, "Father of the Bride" isn't really about Kay's engagement or the wedding preparation, or Mr. Banks' attempts to manage the chaos.

As the title indicates, it's about the relationship between a father and his daughter on the eve of her becoming a wife and starting her own family.

It's a story that would've worked well, even if, as her father suggested, Kay had decided to elope.

[chuckles] Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.