(VOD) Gore Vidal adapts Paddy Chayefsky’s (best known for NETWORK and MARTY) play about a young couple (Debbie Reynolds and Rod Taylor) that wants a no-muss, no-fuss wedding get pressured into a huge wedding by Reynold’s mother (a delightfully antagonistic Bettie Davis) that Reynold’s father (Ernest Borgnine) can’t afford. (It also features Barry Fitzgerald as the idiosyncratic uncle, one of my favorite character actors.)
Like all Chayefsky works, it’s the words, culture, and class issues that matter, but when I think about this film, I think about the set design and decoration: it’s grimy, it’s old, it’s cramped, it’s -lived in-, but it’s home. It’s a fantastic little film that gets lost in Chayefsky’s catalog, simply because it a rather small melodrama, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.