a review by Andrea Passafiume
Weddings and Babies (1958), Morris Engel’s most personal and mature cinematic work, centers on Al (John Myhers), a New York photographer whose pictures of weddings and babies are his bread and butter. However, Al is restless and dreams of something bigger. His longtime assistant/girlfriend Bea (Viveca Lindfors) is turning 30 and wants to get married, but Al isn’t sure he is ready to take that step. Trying to decide what to do with his life, Al juggles the pressures of his relationship, career and an ailing mother (Chiarina Barile) he is trying to care for at the same time.Weddings and Babies was considered by many to be the final film in what became known as Morris Engel’s “New York Trilogy” following in the footsteps of the highly successful The Little Fugitive (1953) and its follow up Lovers and Lollipops (1956). Engel, a pioneering influence in independent cinema and the French New Wave, utilized new technology on Weddings and Babies that allowed him to film while simultaneously recording live sound. Engel liked to shoot in a verité-like style in which he often took to the streets with a small portable camera to capture the spontaneous sights and sounds of real people and places. “Engel’s earlier films,” said noted documentarian Richard Leacock in a 1958 Harper’s article, “had been dubbed – that is, they had used a system perfected by the postwar Italian film-makers of shooting a scene with a silent camera and then fitting dialogue to it in the studio. This made it possible to photograph anywhere, without being chained to the big clumsy sound cameras or upset by ‘extraneous noise.’...To my amazement, Weddings and Babies was not dubbed...Here was a feature theatrical film, shot on regular 35-mm stock, with live spontaneous sound...[it] is the first theatrical motion picture to make use of a fully mobile, synchronous sound-and-picture system.”Morris Engel shot Weddings and Babies in 1957, but it wasn’t released theatrically in the United States until 1960. After winning the prestigious Critics’ Award at the 1958 Venice Film Festival (an honor he shared with Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, 1957), Engel tried for two years to find a distribution deal that was to his satisfaction, but he could not. Ultimately, he decided to book Weddings and Babies into theaters himself and release it independently.Reviews of Weddings and Babies were positive, though they didn’t reach the same high level of praise as Engel’s first film The Little Fugitive. “Weddings and Babies...as a technical exercise in cinema is one of the most exciting feature films the U.S. has produced in a decade,” said Time magazine. The New York Times said, “Like his two previous films, The Little Fugitive and Lovers and Lollipops, this one is done in a highly distinctive and often impressive off-the-cuff photographic style. It is so seemingly casual and impromptu, so evidently uncontrived, both in story development and in the manner in which the shots are made and arranged, that it might be seriously labeled the ‘method’ way of making a film. This accounts for some suddenly exquisite and isolatedly eloquent little bits in Mr. Engel’s picture...The girl is played by Viveca Lindfors, and everything she does—every movement, every gesture, every reaction, every lift and fall of her voice — is so absolutely right and convincing that the style drapes most fitly around her...She is the solid core of this film.”Viveca Lindfors’ real life son with director Don Siegel, Kristoffer Tabori (née Christopher Siegel), appears in the film as the little boy in the photography studio. Chiarina Barile, who plays Al’s elderly Italian mother, was discovered by Morris Engel in true verité style while she was sitting on the stoop of a New York City apartment building.Producer: Morris EngelDirector: Morris EngelScreenplay: Blanche Hanalis, Mary-Madeleine Lanphier, Irving Sunasky (story treatment); Morris Engel (original story)Cinematography: Morris EngelMusic: Eddy Lawrence MansonFilm Editing: Michael Alexander, Stan RussellCast: Viveca Lindfors (Bea), John Myhers (Al), Chiarina Barile (mama), Leonard Elliott (Ken), Joanna Merlin (Josie), Gabriel Kohn (Carl), Mary Faranda (Mrs. Faranda), Kristoffer Tabori (Chris).BW-81m.
by Andrea Passafiume
Source: http://www.tcm.com/
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