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Post by topbilled on Jun 18, 2023 20:48:47 GMT
One thing I enjoy about this film is how well defined all the characters are...and we do get a sense of a certain social class and the ways in which big business is transacted.
Plus we have the war angle, the broadcasting stuff, and some old fashioned melodrama.
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Post by Andrea Doria on Jun 18, 2023 20:50:28 GMT
It was a great scene with the Dutch girl and later with Apples.
Fine movie, thanks for the suggestion, B. F. was a great father, and a good father-in-law.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 18, 2023 20:55:01 GMT
One thing I enjoy about this film is how well defined all the characters are...and we do get a sense of a certain social class and the ways in which big business is transacted.
Plus we have the war angle, the broadcasting stuff, and some old fashioned melodrama. Spot on and part of that is what we've been talking about, they aren't caricatures of "good" liberals or "evil" capitalists, but real people with flaws who do some nice and not nice things - like most people in real life. That's part of why they feel well defined.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 18, 2023 20:56:06 GMT
It was a great scene with the Dutch girl and later with Apples.
Fine movie, thanks for the suggestion, B. F. was a great father, and a good father-in-law. Agreed. Those were some of the best scenes in the movie as they were "earned" by what came before.
As we said before, our girl Lindsay did an incredible job in this one.
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Post by topbilled on Jun 18, 2023 20:57:05 GMT
My favorite moment in the movie is the dinner party at the house in Connecticut.
Love when Tom sarcastically toasts B.F., from whom all blessings flow.
Van Heflin is pitch perfect in that scene.
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Post by topbilled on Jun 18, 2023 20:58:33 GMT
Stanwyck was nominated this year (1948) for her work in SORRY WRONG NUMBER. But I think she's just as good playing B.F.'S DAUGHTER.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 18, 2023 22:15:15 GMT
I haven't read the book...did Tom have an affair in the book? I get the feeling the adultery angle with the Dutch girl has been toned down. From the memory of a guy who reads a bunch of books and watches a lot of movies, I believe, yes, they had a affair in the book's version of the story. Good call. Topbilled, I just read my book review (I'll try to post it tomorrow along with my old movie review) from a few years ago and, yes, Tom had an affair, but it was with a secretary and not with the Dutch exile. I knew my memory on this one was not to be fully trusted.
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Post by topbilled on Jun 18, 2023 22:24:12 GMT
From the memory of a guy who reads a bunch of books and watches a lot of movies, I believe, yes, they had a affair in the book's version of the story. Good call. Topbilled, I just read my book review (I'll try to post it tomorrow along with my old movie review) from a few years ago and, yes, Tom had an affair, but it was with a secretary and not with the Dutch exile. I knew my memory on this one was not to be fully trusted. Thanks. Looking forward to your reviews.
So was the Dutch exile invented for the movie? Or was that character also in the novel?
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 18, 2023 22:32:06 GMT
Topbilled, I just read my book review (I'll try to post it tomorrow along with my old movie review) from a few years ago and, yes, Tom had an affair, but it was with a secretary and not with the Dutch exile. I knew my memory on this one was not to be fully trusted. Thanks. Looking forward to your reviews.
So was the Dutch exile invented for the movie? Or was that character also in the novel? I'm embarrassed to admit, I think there was a Dutch exile and the movie just "mashed" a few storylines together, but I'm not completely certain of my answer.
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Post by topbilled on Jun 18, 2023 22:48:09 GMT
No worries...! Thanks for the info have you have provided.
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Post by Fading Fast on Jun 19, 2023 6:18:18 GMT
I wrote this three years ago.
B.F.'s Daughter from 1948 with Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin (now that's a name), Charles Coburn and Keenan Wynn
Once in a while (almost never now), Hollywood makes a movie that looks at capitalism versus socialism (in this case, as a secondary plot) and, while giving the nod to capitalism (wait, what?), presents both sides with nuance and respect.
A wealthy industrialist's (Coburn) daughter (Stanwyck) drops her slowly rising businessman and father-approved fiancé to marry a left-wing, socialist professor and writer (Heflin) who's the ideological antipode to her capitalist pater.
Her father describes himself thusly, "I'm a builder, the world needs builders," and if, in my life, I stood for something "I stood for rugged individualism." Somewhere Ayn Rand is smiling. Conversely, his daughter's new husband opposes wealth and capitalism and reflexively supports any group perceived as weak and needy.
In a beautiful early scene, when the father and new husband meet, neither play to pat stereotypes: the father sincerely wants to understand the daughter's choice and the new husband sympathetically realizes the pain his marriage is causing the old man.
Modern writers would have flexed their virtue-signally progressive muscles by turning the scene into one of a cold-hearted capitalist disowning his daughter as the socialist son-in-law denounces everything the old man stands for. Here, the daughter isn't disowned and the son-in-law doesn't denounce - making the scene real and powerful.
While the theme of competing economic systems will also indirectly drive the newlywed's bumpy marriage, the marriage itself is the main story. These newlyweds, like most newlyweds, enthusiastically believe their love will overcome all obstacles, the first ones being all but no money to live on and Heflin's career as a writer/speaker stuck in idle.
While Heflin refuses all offers of assistance from his father-in-law, Coburn covertly helps the newlyweds with money he passes to Stanwyck, while, also unbeknownst to Heflin, Stanwyck uses this money (and her father's influence) to jump-start Heflin's career. And as Heflin's career grows, his wife, combining her husband's new money with her father's, purchases a home and the other accoutrements necessary to place her and her husband in society.
As all this slowly dawns on Heflin, he and his wife become estranged as he resents her surreptitious aid and her social aspirations, but also has no intention of going backwards professionally. Instead, a modus vivendi takes place in the marriage as she stays in society in New York, while he goes off to join, his heroes, the New Dealers in WWII Washington.
With the marriage aging poorly, her father, on his deathbed, encourages his daughter to fight for her husband, despite his ideological disagreements with him as he knows her husband is a good man even if he hates his politics. And upon the old man's passing, Helfin reflects that he wasn't fair to a good man who saw the world differently than he does.
The movie's strength is its nuanced balance of competing ideas and personalities versus the approach most movies today take of political and ideological purity (and virtue signaling).
Also running in the background are a couple of on-message subplots. Stanwyck, playing to type for a moment as the jealous society wife, assumes her husband is cheating on her when she finds bills in his things related to another woman's living expenses.
Accusing him without asking, she eventually discovers, to her embarrassment, her husband is helping a blind war refugee get a new start in America. So, we learn that even those who narcissistically put charity on the highest moral pedestal for all to see do some sincere and private good at times.
Conversely, a cocky liberal reporter (Wynn) and friend of Heflin's who denounces Ivy league commissioned officers as the pampered elite of the war - which starts another fight in the Stanwyck-Heflin household - has to eat crow as one of the "elites" he singled out for public mockery (a long-time friend of Stanwyck's) dies heroically on a voluntary mission. So, we learn that having been born to money and status doesn't define, perforce, a person as cowardly and callous.
All of this reflects on the one question the movie asks repeatedly, can a marriage of ideologically opposed people work? The movie - until the Motion Picture Production Code forces a not-believable happy ending in, literally, the last thirty seconds - says no, while real life says it's hard at best. In our politically polarizing times, many married and dating couples are probably asking themselves the exact same question that 1948's B.F.'s Daughter debates so well.
N.B. My comments on the John P. Marquand 1946 book, B.F.'s Daughter, on which the movie, B.F.'s Daughter, is based are here: "B.F.'s Daughter"
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