It strikes like a blessing that, Jane Hurley (Reynolds) is such a pragmatic and unpretentious girl, who is not particularly keen to have a fancy wedding, as long as she can marrie her sweetheart, the straight-arrow Ralph Halloran (Taylor), a honeymoon to California suffices to immensely please both her and her fiancé. It also lifts a big financial burden on the family’s breadwinner Tom (Borgnine), Jane’s father, a taxi driver who has been saving for years to buy a tax medallion and become self-employed.
But, the devil’s advocate is Agnes (Davis), Tom’s wife and Jane’s mother, who cannot live down the guilt that she couldn’t afford an appropriate wedding for her daughter, even if it means to spend all their savings in a one-off ceremony. Of course, social pressure is touched on, we all know the unkind implication of a low-key wedding entails (“a shotgun wedding”), but in Richard Brooks’ searing drawing-room drama of a Bronx working-class family, it is Agnes’ deep-seated discontent of being stuck in a loveless,matrimony that is the wrench in the works.
She and Tom’s union is not built on mutual love but a sort of wager (“you marry me for $300!”), and those ensuing years haven’t assuaged her sourness, so to vent her pent-up dissatisfaction, Jane’s wedding is her way of saying “I’m fed up with the status quo!”, but its repercussions exceed exponentially over the pecuniary expenditure, soon she will come to her senses, but does the status quo remain? That is the big question which THE CATERED AFFAIR acknowledges with a tacit sigh, as Agnes seemingly comes to term with the empty-nest life awaits her and Tom, and can let go of her grudge, but it look less like a victory than making virtue out of necessity. If anything, Brooks at least extrudes some semblance of kitchen-sink realism out of a conventional melodrama that precariously entraps itself with its “blame the mother” sexism.
The central cast is, as expected, the top game here, Davis, as if she becomes matronly just in one night, she was still a star in Stuart Heisler’s THE STAR (1952), but here, denuded of all the glamor trimmings, she is so raw and uncompromising as an ordinary biddy, for once, she is not showboating her theatrics (an impulse Ms. Davis tries very hard to refrain without her voice going too grating), almost expressionlessly entreats audience’s compassion towards a seemingly unregenerate woman, too hardened in her carapace. Agnes is also such a workaday and unappealing character that could have slipped into anonymity had it fallen into lesser hands.
Almost a decade younger than Davis, Borgnine, hot on the heel of his Oscar-winning turn in MARTY (1955), plays Tom with a muted forbearance until the baring-it-all effusion outpours, the effect is spectacular; Fitzgerald is well cast as the bachelor uncle who is miffed at being excluded from “the immediate family” but also doles out the necessary light-heartedness whenever he can make a scene; however, for my money, it is Reynolds, who is the most award-worthy candidate in the fold, she inhabits Jane so fully and passionately, audience will be earnestly happy for her when the dust settles, a paragon of independently thinking but also remarkably understanding young woman, Reynolds doesn’t make Jane a caricature despite her cardboard designation, but a worthy individual of whom one could only wish the world cannot have enough.
By dint of a competent cast and Gore Vidal’s unfussy, perceptive script, and having not lost a modicum of its relatability since its birth, THE CATERED AFFAIR needs to be dusted off from cinema’s goodly shelf of overlooked works and get reappraised for what it is really worth.
referential entries: Brooks’ CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958, 8.2/10); Vincente Minnelli’s FATHER OF THE BRIDE (1950, 7.1/10).
