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The narrating infant ("There I was: Delightful, delicious, and deductible") rests snugly between Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Ichikawa's Between Two Isn't Easy, the birth itself (a mad dash to the hospital as a POV shot though a tunnel) is a visual pun only Frank Tashlin could get away with. Out of the gate and already swamped with bills, the middle-class couple face to face with the challenges of parenthood. Mom (Barbara Hale) is drained by feeding schedules, Dad (Robert Cummings) drops architecture to hawk appliances. Nurses, grandmothers, neighbors, the whole suburban schmeer. "Whether you know it or not now, when you got this baby, a millstone was hung around your neck." A singular bitterness cracks these sitcom surfaces, splendidly exemplified by the husband's grimace as he tries on the office motto ("Sell It with a $mile"). Babysitters are either too young or too old (one's a gum-smacking teenybopper, the other a stone-deaf crone), the search for a night out leads to a bus-stop floozy who vamps along until she's grossed out by the double-entendres. (It ends merrily with Looney Tunes at the drive-in.) Following a spat, Cummings comes home to find Hale a sarcastic parody of the devoted hausfrau, complete with sheer negligee and overflowing tray. When people are controlled by jingles about cows and milk, frustration at the heart of the domestic dream can only come out as a drunken "Moo!" The beer bottle in the heating pan, the Alka-Seltzer in the coffee cup, the absolute foaming beast that is the diaper-chewing washing machine. Tashlin's The Crowd, in other words, a surprising conjunction with Bergman's To Joy. With Bill Goodwin, Cora Witherspoon, Jeff Donnell, Carl Benton Reid, and Mona Barrie. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |