Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Wife portrayed as totally dumb. She had no job. She had control over no money. She almost said her husband was the smartest, and that she was stupid. Archie and Edith.Husband didn't want her to spend one dollar to hear a speech from a modern woman who would be discussing women's situation in the eighteen eighties.Good acting. I am giving it eight out of ten because of the portrayal of attitudes of the time. This is a wealthy family, of white WASPS who are Episcopalian mostly church goers. A friend is Methodist, in whose church there are slight Protestant Christian differences from the Episcopalians.Elizabeth Taylor gets third billing. She is ridiculed by other reviewers here, but I think she did very well. Her character is forward for a female of the time, and her romantic interest is naïve and selfish. He is trying to emulate the personality of his curmudgeon of a father; the father of this film.Irene Dunne was a great singer; witness her voice in Show Boat or was it dubbed? She hums a few bars here, at least in the version I saw.Powell was not just Nick Charles. He was also Florenz Ziegfeld. He was also Godfrey in My Man Godfrey, in which he is a bum who becomes a butler; he is the Forgotten Man of the Great Depression.Here, he is the cantankerous curmudgeon, the name of which I have mentioned several times. He does not respect women, and he talks down to them. He teaches his sons that women are ignorant, backward crybabies who would never carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.White WASPS are the main characters. They are the elite. Irish women, or even recent immigrants, are portrayed as airheads who cannot carry trays as maids, who have nothing is their ditzy little heads.ZaSu Pitts does a turn here, of a cousin. She is not her usual comedic self. She is more droll and lifeless than I have seen her in other performances.Martin Milner as a young lad is interesting. He later appeared in the Adam Twelve TV series, as a police officer.Do not call this film dated. It was made after World War Two, when the world was crying for sweet nostalgia, a world of Gilded Age niceties and cooks and housemaids. The audience was tired of movies about killing and fighting.The long running play on which this film is based ran from pre World War Two to afterward, actually starting in the later years of the Great Depression. The play and film must have both been uplifting to audiences during dark and gloomy times.Eight out of ten.

The film, based upon the life of Clarence Day Sr., a governor on the New York Stock Exchange in 1883, AND the longest running non-musical Broadway stage play at the time, received only three minor Oscar nominations: Color Art Direction-Set Decoration, Cinematography and Score, though William Powell (in the title role) earned his third and last Best Actor nomination. Despite an outstanding leading actress performance by Irene Dunne, as Day's spouse Vinnie, neither Dunne nor the picture received Academy Award nominations.While some may dismiss Life With Father (1947) for its dated (to the point of archaic) expressions and attitudes about life, they should remember that it was quaint at the time of its release. Indeed, it's a time capsule of pre-turn-of-the-century New York, when men were the unquestioned heads of their nuclear families; or were they? In fact, as bombastic and outspoken as (Powell's) Day is, he is in fact manipulated in subtle ways by his wife (Dunne's) Vinnie, whom he loves dearly. On the surface, Day is in charge of the money and every household decision, many of which he makes demonstratively by loudly proclaiming his dominance while often belittling his wife's lack of sound logic. Vinnie, however, while she respects her husband's traditional position and accepts that he has a superior intellect, doesn't passively allow herself to be bowled over by him. She sticks to her principles and even wrongheaded notions in a 'forceful' yet nonthreatening way – though perhaps a little too frequently by crying – such that "Clare" (for Clarence), out of his love for her or sometimes just exasperation, has to give in.There are hilarious scenes concerning the family finances which begin with Vinnie humbly having to ask for money or explain her spending that leave Clare confused and Vinnie with the cash or her desired result: a porcelain pug dog is returned to pay for their son's new suit of clothes. This "battle of the sexes" scenario is then transferred generationally when a "puppy dog romance" develops between Clarence Jr. (Jimmy Lydon) and visiting Cousin Cora's (Zasu Pitts) traveling companion Mary Skinner, played by 15-year old Elizabeth Taylor. After a lesson about the need to "be firm" with women from Clarence Sr. – a priceless scene, that immediately precedes one in which Clare follows the advice he'd just given his son with Vinnie, telling her "it's for your own good" when she cries – Junior tells Mary that she must write him the minute she returns home from her visit to New York. But having been properly schooled, Mary of course is determined to have him write to her first; she strikes a balance between using her tears and her will to get her way. Like Clare, who doesn't know what he said that brought his wife to tears, Junior is also clueless that he's been manipulated, and he enthusiastically starts to write his first letter to Mary even before her horse cab has left their street. Outwardly, the males have the authority but it's the females that wield real power, something that's not really confined to the 19th century.The other major storyline that demonstrates "who wears the pants in the (Day) family" has to do with the revelation that Clare has yet to be baptized. Vinnie is convinced that her husband won't be able to enter Heaven without correcting the situation, the sooner the better, and enlists the support of their children and the Reverend Dr. Lloyd (Edmund Gwenn). But Clarence Sr. is adamant that he doesn't need to be baptized, saying "They can't keep me out of Heaven on a technicality" and "if there's one place the Church should leave alone, it's a man's soul!" Upset - or "stirred up" as Clare would say - over her husband's eternal life, Vinnie falls ill, which is made worse when her entrepreneurial sons, Clarence Jr. and John (Martin Milner's screen debut), put "Bartlett's Beneficent Balm" – a 'miracle' cure they've signed up to sell – in her tea, thinking it will help with her "women's complaints". But their mother then really does become ill and the normally prudent Clare spares no expense to get Vinnie well, even promising her that he'll be baptized if she'll just pull through. When she does, he tries to excuse his actions and the argument continues, but in the (literal) end, as always, Vinnie gets her way.A couple of other odds & ends worth mentioning: one of the ways that Clarence Sr.'s eccentricities are conveyed is through the continuous flow of maids that the family goes through; he inadvertently scares them into quitting or fires them for incompetence. Even when he tries to intervene in his wife's affairs by hiring a replacement, Vinnie lets her go because the maid's outfit doesn't fit her. There's also a curious physical gesture that one of the maids does after exclaiming "a redhead" each time she notices the hair color of the Day's children; she licks two fingers on her right hand before slapping them, and then her fist, into her left palm. "Oh Gad", I almost forgot, some of the expressions such as this favorite exclamation of Clarence Sr. are priceless, including falderal – akin to poppycock – and "confound it".Michael Curtiz directed the Donald Ogden Stewart screenplay, which transformed the successful play by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse – based on Clarence Day Jr.'s memoir – into movie sets for some scenes and dramatized others that were only referred to in the play. Rounding out the credited cast: Emma Dunn played the Day's longtime cook Margaret, Moroni Olsen played Dr. Humphries, Elisabeth Risdon was Mrs. Whitehead, Derek Scott was the Day's youngest son Harlan who adopts a dog and Johnny Calkins their third oldest Whitney (had to learn his catechism), Monte Blue was the policeman, Frank Elliot was Dr. Somers and Heather Wilde, Mary Field, Queenie Leonard and Nancy Evans were the string of maids.

William Powell and Irene Dunne with Elizabeth Taylor and some other people. On the up side, lots of practical family issues are dealt with through character development, and this is where the fun lies.Powell is the patriarch of an all-red-headed WASP family. He is a pain-in-the-butt overbearing dictator but otherwise lovable husband/father. Every time he turns around he whines about something, never content. This is used for humor, but it goes way overboard. There are scenes of all his kids (and perhaps also his wife) sitting down on one long bench, all lined up nicely, and facing him. "Father" stands across the room and glares at them. This image reminded me of a bunch of rubber ducks lined up in a carnival shooting gallery. Ughh. Quite a chore to get through. I dare you to watch this movie for more than 10 consecutive minutes at a time. Really! It is two hours in length, and seems to get good maybe about 3/4 of the way through.Powell's "Father" character says he will get baptized to save a situation, but later isn't interested. Will he get baptized by the end of the movie? Will he ever stop nitpicking everyone in his home? Will he ever tell his wife he loves her?? What is the latest maid's name, and what happened to the one that was working for them just yesterday? Did her uniform not fit, just like the maid that quit the day before that?? What formalities and drama. And it is in Technicolor too, probably so you can see that they all have red hair. Woo-hoo. I am a fan of B&W, so B&W with lots of shadows and eerie overtones might have been better though I think.I am giving it a 6/10 for all the attention to commotion and nonsense. Sort of like Grand Hotel in a way but not really. :) Film it in B&W and I would have given it a 7/10. Yes, the color does detract from it for me. I thought it was going to be a B&W feature like the picture you see here on IMDb. :)

In his third and final Oscar nomination, William Powell was nominated for playing the bellowing and lovable 19th century domestic tyrant Clarence Day, Sr. in Life With Father. If he had to lose I'm sure Powell was glad it was to his very good friend in real life Ronald Colman for A Double Life. Still with that strange flaming red hair on top of his familiar features, Powell imprints his own personality on the leading role of the longest running play on Broadway up to that time.Based on the recollections of Clarence Day, Jr. as played by Jimmy Lydon here, Life With Father ran for eight years on Broadway for 3447 performances. It was brought to the stage by Howard Lindsay and his two partners, writing partner Russell Crouse who adapted Day's work to the stage and life partner Dorothy Stickney who with her husband got their career roles on Broadway. The play ran from 1939 through 1947 taking America right through World War II. The time that it was written and presented to the public may account for its popularity as the public might just have wanted reassurance of American values at that critical point.As Lindsay and Stickney had no kind of movie box office, Warner Brothers decided to acquire William Powell for the lead and cast Irene Dunne as the wise mother who has learned just the right way to handle her husband and inevitably get what she wants. Powell is a man who thinks when all else has failed, he can bellow his way through any situation. My favorite line in the play is when he tries to hire a maid and that title quote is when he's asked for references.Warner paid a lot in loan outs for this film. Irene Dunne was not a contract employee of his studio and Elizabeth Taylor was also borrowed from MGM for the small, decorative part of a cousin that gets Jimmy Lydon and Martin Milner's hormones in an uproar. The part that Taylor plays was originated on Broadway by another future film star, Teresa Wright.Incidentally Martin Milner reminisced many years later about the film and said of all the boys and of course Powell, he was the only natural redhead among the lot.Edmund Gwenn fresh from an Oscar himself for Miracle on 34th Street plays the Episcopalian minister who is trying to get a large contribution from Powell for a new church. Their discussion is also a highlight of the play and the fact that Powell had never been baptized is also a subject of a lot of humor.Father still had life well into the Fifties with a television series adapted from the play that starred Leon Ames as dear old dad.The play, the film still have a lot of character in it.