Life with Father

Welcome to our Film of the Week – which we wanted to get in for Father’s Day, but you can still watch it anytime with your father in mind.  It’s Life with Father (1947), directed by the great and quirky Michael Curtiz (you may know his touch from Casablanca).  The movie is based on a book of the same name, by the jack-of-many-trades Clarence Day, Jr., whose father was a successful broker on the New York Stock Exchange, back before the turn of the century.  Mr. Day – played to comic perfection by William Powell – is stubborn, domineering, ebullient, honest, upright, and just as likely to burst out laughing as to roar over a burnt slice of toast.  He and his wife have four boys, all of them red-heads, and yes, that means a lot of action, often unpredictable.  But Mr. Day is one of a kind.  When he goes to the agency to hire a new maid, and the woman in charge demands to know the character of his family, he replies, just as he is about to storm into the back room where the prospective ma…