Father’s Little Dividend (1951)

Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Starring Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, Don Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, Billie Burke, Moroni Olsen, Marietta Canty.

Another badly outmoded feature-length sitcom with Tracy as self-absorbed suburban dad (and sentient mid-life crisis) Stanley Banks, rushed into production to capitalize on the unaccountable success of Father of the Bride. Here, he finds a new “fact of life” to neurotically obsess over—now that the apple of his eye is married, he’s about to become a grandfather. Stanley is slightly more tolerable this time, but the rest of the film is even more hackneyed and less humorous start-to-finish, saddled with an armload of the sort of musty jokes that should be chased by a sad trombone. The construction is shoddy, too: built upon misguided “relatability” while forcing its characters into puzzling situations, none more puzzling than the one near the end where the new grandpa loses the baby in the park because he left it alone on a whim to play soccer with a bunch of kids! Whether trying to summon fleet-footed merriment or filling an anxious scene with overwrought suspense, Albert Sendrey’s score is a disaster.

38/100