WEEK END WITH FATHER (1951) B/W 83m dir: Douglas Sirk

w/ Van Heflin, Patricia Neal, Gigi Perreau, Virginia Field, Richard Denning, Jimmy Hunt, Janine Perreau, Tommy Rettig, Gary Pagett, Forrest Williams, Frances E. Williams, Elvia Allman, Martha Mears

The plot synopsis from Jon Halliday's Sirk on Sirk: "A widower, Brad Stubbs [Heflin], and a widow, Jean Bowen [Neal], meet while sending their children off to camp. He is being pursued by a glamorous TV star [Field], whom his daughters would like him to marry; she is pursued by a nature-boy PT instructor [Denning], whom her sons would like her to marry. 'It has the Thoreau theme in it; it ties up with All That Heaven Allows.... I can't remember the picture too well any longer. I think I did it only for the children.' (Sirk)."

This was only Sirk's fourth film for Universal International Studios, and it would be two more years before he'd make MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, the first of his very successful American melodramas. This film is interesting because it represents an early example of the function children serve in Sirk's work: disruption and repression. WEEK END WITH FATHER is a comedy, so their actions don't have dire repercussions, but the kids in the melodramas can really cause trouble (in THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW and ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, for example).

An article from the New York Times by Hal Erickson, Rovi: "This seminal Brady Bunch stars Van Heflin as a widower and Patricia Neal as a widow. Both parties have several children by their first marriages. Heflin and Neal fall in love and decide to marry, each hoping to adopt the other's kids. The couple idealistically subscribes to the 'one big happy family' theory, but they hadn't figured that their kids would dislike the idea ... and each other. This mild situation comedy was directed with lots of efficiency but little style by Douglas Sirk, who did better for himself with Universal's big-budget romantic melodramas of the mid-1950s."

The following contains information you may not want to know before viewing the film for the first time:

From the Senses of Cinema website (wwww.sensesofcinema.com), "The Bleakness of the Happy Ending: Sirk's Uncomfortable Comedies" by Tom Ryan:

"New Yorkers Brad (Van Heflin) and Jean (Patricia Neal) meet at New York’s Grand Central Station as they’re farewelling their children, who are off to summer camp in Maine. He has two girls, Anne (Gigi Perreau ...) and Patty (Jeanine Perreau, Gigi’s real-life sister); she has two boys, Gary (Jimmy Hunt) and David (Tommy Rettig). The other man in the story is camp counselor Don Adams (Richard Denning); the other woman is TV star Phyllis Reynolds (Field ...).

"While Sirk’s use of two shots binds Brad and Jean together visually, events in general and the couple’s children seem committed to pushing them apart. And, as tensions arise, the camera repeatedly assumes low angles during indoor sequences, creating the impression of ceilings and the architecture around the characters pressing in claustrophobically on them.

"Sexual and social stereotypes are to the fore. During the opening sequence at Grand Central Station, Adams reassures the concerned Jean that she shouldn’t worry, that the camp is just what her sons need, that 'it will make men out of them.' Most of Brad and Jean’s subsequent conversations with each other and others are peppered with references to the pressures on them about how they’re supposed to behave as male and female parents and their fears of failing to live up to their responsibilities. It’s as if they are enslaved by the expectations that have been imposed on them from without and that they have assimilated.

"Bumbling Brad’s timidity proves in sharp contrast to cocky Don’s red-blooded ways when the two parents visit their offspring at the camp for 'brother and sister day.' 'He’s nothing to cry over,' Gary tells his mother to comfort her in a moment of crisis in her relationship with Brad. 'He can’t follow a trail, can’t fight, can’t jump, can’t run. He can’t do anything. What good is he?' In their eyes, muscle-bound Don is much more worthy of their mother’s attentions. A man’s man, a collection of the kind of attributes that make a man a man, a man who, in Brad’s words, 'would make Tarzan look anaemic.'

"On the other side of the gender equation, warm, caring Jean is the living antithesis of Phyllis’s career-woman coldness. As poor, emasculated Brad points out to Phyllis late in the film ..., 'The problem is that you don’t know how to be a mother. And I do.' However, his daughters are impressed by 'Auntie Phyllis' because she’s a celebrity, and they do their darndest to ensure that she stays around, even after she’s worn out her welcome with their father. They can’t see her failings, or the unfairness of the social expectations afflicting her too, and, like Brad’s sons, wield far too much influence on their parent’s choice of partner.

"Frequently in the melodramas, Sirk’s children become warriors against the best interests of their parents (as in There's Always Tomorrow [1956] and All That Heaven Allows [1955]). They manipulate circumstances to achieve what they see as appropriate outcomes. And, more often than not, they become instruments of social oppression, acting on behalf of social mores that are working to prevent their parents from achieving happiness.

"Here, their eventual change of heart about their parents’ potential partners doesn’t affect their modus operandi, just the ends to which it is applied. Rather than leaving Brad and Jean to sort out their own lives, they continue to conspire to achieve their goals .... And their motivations have less to do with what their parents might want than their belated realisation of how they might themselves be inconvenienced by the partners to whom they’d originally given their endorsement (like being forced to eat health food rather than hamburgers).

"One of the film’s wryest aspects is its depiction of parents rather than children as the ones in need of protection. In fact, the children pose a key threat to their happiness. They might officially be regarded as Brad and Jean’s dependents, but they actually operate as an occupying force in their lives, denying them their privacy (the interruption motif so central to Sirk’s films in general is to the fore here) and plotting to undermine their relationship.

"There is a constant sense of disquiet created by the pressures that undermine the parents’ attempts to find both a physical and a psychological space for themselves. The children are a key factor, but they’re not alone. During the parents’ visit to the camp, they all go riding together, their route to the top of a mountain and back guided by markers. While Brad boasts about his prowess at manly adventures like this, he’s also well aware of the dangers: 'I’d hate to think of where we’d wind up without those markers,' he says. The scene provides a handy metaphor for his situation in relation to the social rules that proscribe not just his but all of the characters’ lives. And, in such a context, the chaos that ensues after David removes the markers points to how reliant everyone is on guidelines to show them the way.

"In line with Gary’s criticism of his inadequacies, Brad comes to believe that he’s a failure, that his inability to take charge of a situation --- a horse ride up the side of a mountain, a bag race, a relationship --- are signs of his inadequacy as a male. His fears aren’t dissimilar from those that afflict Stanley Banks (Spencer Tracy) in [Vincente] Minnelli’s equally discomfiting family comedies, Father of the Bride (1950) and Father's Little Dividend (1951).

"Another unsettling force at work in the film is the way in which it subverts the customary happy ending which brings the couple together by way of validation of the lessons they’ve learned during their passage towards each other. Here, there’s little sense that anyone has achieved any real understanding of anything. Brad and Jean drive off with the 'Just Married' banner across the boot of their car, but the notion that he’s become some kind of hero --- by finding the boys who’d been 'lost' --- is an illusion and there’s no suggestion that he or anyone else has really learned anything about themselves or each other during the course of the film."