CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN
**/**** Image B+ Sound B+
starring Clifton Webb, Jeanne Crain, Myrna Loy, Betty Lynn
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on the novel by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Walter Lang
BELLES ON THEIR TOES
**/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jeanne Crain, Myrna Loy, Debra Paget, Jeffrey Hunter
screenplay by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, based on the book by Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
directed by Henry Levin
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Periodically, one comes across a critic who yearns for the qualities of golden-age studio filmmaking. This person will point to the technical proficiency that has since vanished from our cinema and appeal to something other than brutal, instant gratification in their narrative makeup. In response, I offer 1950's Cheaper by the Dozen and its sequel, Belles on their Toes, as examples of how these elements can be used for evil and not for good. Aesthetically, there's nothing especially wrong with them: Though directors Walter Lang and Henry Levin aren't masters, they're solid professionals, and they help the saga of an enormous family go down fairly easy. But what they're sending down is something conformist and ugly, making a phoney harmony out of ingredients that would under normal circumstances repel each other and fly off into space. Thus the initial film is about being crowded into one space under the rule of a benign despot, and the sequel, though backed into a mildly subversive corner, still manages to minimize the dark undertones of the family unit.
