FILM : Spencer Tracy Version Is a Less Hectic Father of the ‘Bride’

The rituals of marriage--an old-fashioned, very ‘50s-style marriage--turn Spencer Tracy’s life into a quaint chamber of horrors in the original “Father of the Bride.”

Not to be confused with last year’s hectic and hip remake starring Steve Martin, Vincente Minnelli’s 1950 movie is like a 90-minute slow burn as Tracy faces one mundane obstacle after another. Tracy explodes every now and then on the way to daughter Kay’s (Elizabeth Taylor) wedding, but basically does the right thing--his Stanley may be a fuddy-duddy, but he’s a game one.

What gives this slender movie (screening Friday night as part of Golden West College’s “Outdoor Family Film Festival”) its appeal is how Minnelli and writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett check out all the huge and tiny steps in the complicated process with such gleeful, and usually wry, detail.

Stanley’s herculean mission begins when Kay dreamily talks about her beau, Buckley (Don Taylor), over dinner. Nobody slips into a reverie quite like the young Elizabeth Taylor, and she does it here with a special flutteriness. Stanley, or “Pops” as Kay calls him, isn’t nearly ready to see his little girl swept away by some stranger, but that’s what happens.

Tracy, an actor so reassuring he could make a growl sound comforting, toys with all the stereotyped notions of fatherhood. A really funny scene has him recalling all the strange boys who buzzed around Kay over the years (let’s see, there’s a beatnik, a sign-carrying radical and a big-shouldered letterman, among others) with a mixture of bemusement and dread. Later, he imagines the vacuous Buckley as a violent bigamist with two or three other families secreted away.

Once he regains his balance and gives in to the inevitable, after a comic meeting with Buckley where Stanley blunderingly tries to figure out the young man’s “intentions,” the picture is mostly about wedding preparations.

As the bills pile up and the big day nears, Stanley goes a tad haywire again. Minnelli and cinematographer John Alton save some of their best work for a surreal dream sequence in which Stanley conjures up all sorts of terrors disrupting the ceremony. The scene is stylishly choreographed, just like most of Minnelli’s classic musicals, especially “An American in Paris,” the one he made right after “Father of the Bride.”

There’s a lot of huffing and puffing over the smallest stuff, and that’s the funniest thing about “Father of the Bride”--how it gives one of our most sacred institutions a gentle mugging.

What: Vincente Minnelli’s “Father of the Bride.”

When: Friday, July 24, with amphitheater opening at 7 p.m. and show starting around 8.

Where: Golden West College amphitheater, 15744 Golden West St., Huntington Beach.

Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Golden West Street and head south.

Wherewithal: $1.50 and $2.

Where to Call: (714) 891-3991.